Dr. Ekberg hits me right where I live

This can only be viewed on YouTube. Note what Dr. Ekberg says about the relationship between intermittent fasting and treatments like exogenous insulin and metformin (which he views as fairly benign, but see Dr. Jason Fung below). Watch at 2X speed if you want. Meanwhile, here's one of the most important passages from Dr. Jason Fung's book The Diabetes Code:

Your doctor may prescribe a medication such as insulin injections, or perhaps a drug called metformin, to lower blood glucose, but these drugs do not rid the body of excess glucose. Instead, they simply continue to take the glucose out of the blood and ram it back into the body. It then gets shipped out to other organs, such as the kidneys, the nerves, the eyes, and the heart, where it can eventually create other problems. The underlying problem, of course, is unchanged. Remember the bowl that was overflowing with sugar? It still is. Insulin has simply moved the glucose from the blood, where you could see it, into the body, where you cannot. So the very next time you eat, sugar spills out into the blood again and you inject insulin to cram it into your body. Whether you think of it as an overstuffed suitcase or an overflowing bowl, it’s the same phenomenon all over again. The more glucose you force your body to accept, the more insulin your body needs to overcome the resistance to it. But this insulin only creates more resistance as the cells become more and more distended. Once you’ve exceeded what your body can produce naturally, medications can take over. At first, you need only a single medication, but eventually it becomes two and then three, and the doses become larger. And here’s the thing: if you are taking more and more medications to keep your blood glucose at the same level, your diabetes is actually getting worse.

Conventional diabetes treatments: How to make the problems worse

The blood glucose got better with insulin, but the diabetes got worse. The medications only hid the blood glucose by cramming it into the already engorged cells. The diabetes looks better but actually it is worse. Doctors may congratulate themselves on the illusion of a job well done, even as patients get sicker. No amount of medication prevents the heart attacks, congestive heart failure, strokes, kidney failure, amputations, and blindness that result when diabetes is getting worse. “Oh well,” the doctor says, “it’s a chronic, progressive disease.” Here’s an analogy. Consider that hiding garbage under your bed instead of discarding it allows you to pretend that your house is clean. When there’s no more room under the bed, you can throw the garbage into the closet. In fact, you can hide it anywhere you can’t see it: in the basement, in the attic, even in the bathroom. But if you keep hiding your garbage, eventually it’s going to begin to smell really, really bad because it’s starting to rot. Instead of hiding it, you need to throw it out. If the solution to your overflowing suitcase and your overflowing house seems obvious, the solution to too much glucose, which leads to too much insulin, should also seem self-evident: Get rid of it! But the standard treatment for type 2 diabetes follows the same flawed logic of hiding the glucose instead of eliminating it. If we understand that too much glucose in the blood is toxic, why can’t we understand that too much glucose in the body is also toxic?

[ ... ]  

Standard medications do not prevent the progression of organ failure because they do not help excrete the toxic sugar load. No [fewer] than seven multinational, multicenter, randomized, placebo-controlled trials have proved that standard medications that lower blood glucose do not reduce heart disease, the major killer of diabetic patients. We have pretended that these glucose-lowering medications make people healthier, but it’s been a lie. We have overlooked a singular truth: you can’t use drugs to cure a dietary disease.  

FACT: TYPE 2 DIABETES IS REVERSIBLE AND PREVENTABLE WITHOUT MEDICATIONS 

Once we understand that type 2 diabetes is simply too much sugar in the body, the solution becomes obvious. Get rid of the sugar. Don’t hide it away. Get rid of it. There are really only two ways to accomplish this. 

1. Put less sugar in. 

2. Burn off remaining sugar. 

That’s it. That’s all we need to do. The best part? It’s all natural and completely free. No drugs. No surgery. No cost.

The literature I got from the hospital before leaving says none of this—which is why I'm on metformin and insulin—and it's one of the reasons why I've said that I think Korean medicine is maybe 20 years behind (parts of) the West, and by extension one of the reasons why I still have trust issues about Korean medicine. One of the many books I'd been given at Samsung Hospital talks about the diet I should follow—a diet full of carbs (a little below the USDA 45-60% daily allowance). Jason Fung, meanwhile, stands at the cutting edge of diabetes research, but I can imagine how resistant Korean doctors would be to his advice. Here, timid conservatism trumps aggressive innovation. To be sure, if I read Fung's book and failed to follow his advice, that's on me, but it doesn't invalidate Fung's insights one bit.

I'm not following Fung's recommended diet right now, but I'm mindful of it. I'm back on Roy Taylor's Newcastle diet (from his Your Simple Guide to Reversing Type 2 Diabetes, suggested by my friend Neil) and will remain there for the next ten weeks. After that, I have to get strict about following keto, carnivore, or something extremely low carb.

One lingering issue to discuss is whether I'm in any position to question the experts given my dire situation. I'd say yes, at the risk of sounding stubborn. I'm not making judgments willy-nilly; I'm arming myself with knowledge from better experts and doing my best to make intelligent decisions about my own care. If I mess up in that care because of my own weakness of character, that's not a knock against the experts in the West that I've read, nor is it affirmation that the Korean docs have it right. And that's about where I stand on these topics.