Blood Glucose Meter

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Aaron Baugher said:

Anyone know anything about these free blood glucose meters I've seen
advertised on TV lately? I saw one that claimed you didn't have to
[censored] yourself, so I wrote down the name of the company and found
their web site. It turns out that to get the free meter, you have to
sign up as a customer, which requires that you give them your doctor's
info so they can get your prescription for diabetes.

I'd like to have a meter, but I'd rather not mess around with going to
a doctor, and I don't know that I'd be diagnosed with diabetes yet
anyway. Is it really possible to get a BG meter that doesn't require
you to draw blood every time? If so, how does that work? Can you
just buy one?

Not only can you just buy one, you can usually get it for free. There's
usually a big rebate at the store and an additional mail in rebate. The
reason for this is that the real profit is in the strips you keep buying
for the tests.

Buy a Walmart Relion meter for cheap, it has the cheapest strip
replacement cost.

You will need to draw blood for any reliable meter, and it's not painful
if you do it right. Warming the finger under warm water first really
helps, as does some fish oil each day.

Susan

x-no-archive: yes

Cubit said:

The real test is called an HbA1c and is almost exclusively done from lab
bloodwork. A home tester is available, but in addition to buying the meter,
(last I heard) the
one-time-use test strips were $50 each.

Not so on either point. An HbA1c is just an average, it doesn't tell
you if you're spiking into diabetic ranges after meals and then having
reactive blood glucose lows. It's supposed to average 3 mos. bg, but is
actually heavily weighted to the most recent few weeks. It tells you
nothing about which foods trigger your bg higher individually and in
what quantities; testing before meals, then one and two hours afterward
does. HbA1c is never to be used to diagnose DM, just to monitor average
control.

Strips vary in cost from about $40 to $80 per hundred, not for single use.

Susan

In article <[email hidden]>,

Aaron Baugher said:

Anyone know anything about these free blood glucose meters I've seen
advertised on TV lately? I saw one that claimed you didn't have to
[censored] yourself, so I wrote down the name of the company and found
their web site. It turns out that to get the free meter, you have to
sign up as a customer, which requires that you give them your doctor's
info so they can get your prescription for diabetes.

The things you see advertised on TV are mostly from scam pharmacies.
They want you to transfer your prescriptions, for which they'll get
reimbursed by Medicare. So, it means "at no cost to *you*". At least
some people who deal with those pharmacies have reported on
alt.support.diabetes that their prescriptions were changed to something
with a higher profit margin.

Also, what you probably heard them say was "no painful finger [censored]".
The stress there is on *finger*; many of the newer meters come with an
alternate cap to the lancing device that allows you to get your little
blood sample from the palm of your hand or your forearm. This is
referred to as "alternative site testing", and there's some dispute over
how reliable it is. For a fasting reading, I believe it's OK, but not so
much if your blood sugar level is changing rapidly.

So, if you want to test your blood sugar: (a) you don't need a
prescription; (b) you might be able to get a meter at low cost (or free,
with rebate), but meters are like inkjet printers in that the profit is
in the test strips; (c) you're going to have to get drops of blood
somehow; (d) doing so is generally not at all painful, if you do it
right.

--
AF
"Non Sequitur U has a really, really lousy debate team."
--artyw raises the bar on rec.sport.baseball

Last I heard, they need to draw blood. Super expensive models used a laser
and were supposed to be almost painless. Several companies are trying to
get approval for an implanted BG device. You would then just scan your
implant for the current reading.

The real test is called an HbA1c and is almost exclusively done from lab
bloodwork. A home tester is available, but in addition to buying the meter,
(last I heard) the
one-time-use test strips were $50 each.

"Aaron Baugher" <[email hidden]> wrote in message
news:[email hidden]...

Quoted message said:

Anyone know anything about these free blood glucose meters I've seen
advertised on TV lately? I saw one that claimed you didn't have to
[censored] yourself, so I wrote down the name of the company and found
their web site. It turns out that to get the free meter, you have to
sign up as a customer, which requires that you give them your doctor's
info so they can get your prescription for diabetes.

I'd like to have a meter, but I'd rather not mess around with going to
a doctor, and I don't know that I'd be diagnosed with diabetes yet
anyway. Is it really possible to get a BG meter that doesn't require
you to draw blood every time? If so, how does that work? Can you
just buy one?

Thanks,
--
Aaron -- 285/235/200 -- aaron.baugher.biz

"If you hear hoofbeats, you just go ahead and think horsies, not
zebras."

Aaron Baugher said:

Anyone know anything about these free blood glucose meters I've seen
advertised on TV lately? I saw one that claimed you didn't have to
[censored] yourself, so I wrote down the name of the company and found
their web site. It turns out that to get the free meter, you have to
sign up as a customer, which requires that you give them your doctor's
info so they can get your prescription for diabetes.

I'd like to have a meter, but I'd rather not mess around with going to
a doctor, and I don't know that I'd be diagnosed with diabetes yet
anyway. Is it really possible to get a BG meter that doesn't require
you to draw blood every time? If so, how does that work? Can you
just buy one?

Hi, Aaron --

I don't know a thing about meters that don't require blood.

If you want to pick one up, Wal-Mart has one for about $10, and the
strips are about $50 for 100. A lot of companies give away meters (or
have rebates on them) because they get you with the strips -- which
run about $1 each.

The Wal-Mart meter is accurate enough, and cheap to use.

Good luck.
--
BlueBrooke
254/236/135 -- 01 Jan 2007

Alice Faber said:

The things you see advertised on TV are mostly from scam pharmacies.
They want you to transfer your prescriptions, for which they'll get
reimbursed by Medicare.

Yeah, that's what it looks like. I kind of assume any "free" offer is
some sort of scam until proven otherwise; but since I don't have
Medicare or any prescriptions, I thought maybe I could scam the
scammers and get a free meter from them. No such luck.

Quoted message said:

Also, what you probably heard them say was "no painful finger
[censored]".

Ah ha! I do believe you are correct. So not only could they have you
test somewhere other than the finger, but if they can get a focus
group to say it wasn't especially painful....

Quoted message said:

So, if you want to test your blood sugar: (a) you don't need a
prescription; (b) you might be able to get a meter at low cost (or
free, with rebate), but meters are like inkjet printers in that the
profit is in the test strips; (c) you're going to have to get drops
of blood somehow; (d) doing so is generally not at all painful, if
you do it right.

Thanks to you and everyone else for the info. I'm not such a sissy
that I'm afraid to [censored] my finger, but I picture myself wanting to go
all nerd scientist about it, checking my BG every five minutes for the
first several days and making graphs and stuff, so I thought that
might get a little painful.

--
Aaron -- 285/235/200 -- aaron.baugher.biz

"If you hear hoofbeats, you just go ahead and think horsies, not
zebras."

There was a coupon in our newspaper this week for a free meter, they are
easy to get free without a doctor's prescription, but you will have to pay
for the test strips. Drugstore.com has a cheap setup:
http://tinyurl.com/3y77gz 100 Strips for it are $50. RiteAid carries these
and I believe they have packages of 50 strips for about $28.

Aaron Baugher wrote:
|
| Yeah, that's what it looks like. I kind of assume any "free" offer is
| some sort of scam until proven otherwise; but since I don't have
| Medicare or any prescriptions, I thought maybe I could scam the
| scammers and get a free meter from them. No such luck.
|