Are there alternative treatments for diabetes?

Can alternative or natural therapies really help treat diabetes? With this guide you can weigh the evidence for yourself and decide, with your doctor, whether you want to try them.

Well-timed eating, balanced meals, healthy portion sizes, exercise, stress relief. Are there other measures beyond these that can help keep blood sugar under control? Perhaps.

• There was a time when doctors were openly hostile to alternative approaches to medicine. That's changing, because doctors have seen for themselves that natural approaches sometimes work and because they want patients who use these treatments to keep them in the loop.
• Natural approaches, from acupuncture and herbs to minerals and magnet therapy, are less well studied than those of diet and exercise. Certainly, none of them can replace diet and exercise if you want to lose weight and permanently improve your health, but some may help.

Modern medicine has given us an array of weapons to fight diabetes, many of which weren't available even a decade ago.

• Take the best-selling drug metformin. It dams the release of glucose from the liver, slows the absorption of glucose from food, lowers blood levels of triglycerides (which helps fight heart disease), and may even help people with diabetes lose weight.
• But don't give chemists and synthetic compounds all the credit; metformin is derived from French lilac, a traditional remedy for high blood sugar.
• Should you try an alternative approach? Chances are, you've already done so. In a recent survey, 57 percent of people with diabetes said they had tried complementary and alternative medicine within the previous year, and 34 percent said they had tried treatments specifically for diabetes.

Here's an interesting twist; some of the therapies that may be most promising are relatively little used. Fewer than seven percent of people with diabetes surveyed take herbs that studies suggest may help control blood sugar.There are plenty of reasons to be wary of herbs and supplements you find on supermarket and drugstore shelves and in health food stores.

• First, the supplement industry is not regulated (except in the rare cases where a product appears to be blatantly dangerous), so you can't be sure you're getting a product that works.
• Natural medicines can't be patented, so there's not much incentive for companies to shell out big money to prove their effectiveness.

Still, there are glimmers of potential in the small amount of research that does exist.

• There are therapies that do show promise for helping to control diabetes or some of its major complications. But because they've undergone relatively little research, regimens and doses can only be suggested and shouldn't be taken as medical advice.

If you decide to try any type of alternative therapy, talk to your doctor first and be sure to keep him or her informed once you start your therapy.