So, the rate at which Novolog or Humalog/Lispro works. The latter is (are) slower - ahem, closer to my own needs but my insurance won’t pay for Lispro (they’ve never heard of Lispro!) - but the rates are close enough. Bell-ish curve graph, quick hump, dwindling thereafter.
But unless I totally missed some setting somewhere (did I??), Dash only calculates IOB in a linear fashion. If you set a Duration time of 5 hours, Dash says you’ve gotten half of the effect of your bolus after 2.5 hours, which, I mean - how is it that an insulin pump company can’t make any better of a calculation than that??
I don’t understand. They should have been able to come up with an algorithm to calculate more accurately years ago. Unless… I have Dash 5, does Dash 6 have more mathematical sense?
Or did I miss a setting that I still can’t find?
I have a ton of really, truly, much more important things to worry about these days, but somehow I’m stuck on this. It’s been frustrating me ever since I switched to Novolog/Dash when my insurance made me. I don’t know whether I’m asking for help understanding Dash’s rationale or exercising my frustrations through a proxy, forgive me.
Medtronic and Tandem use straight line too. It’s lazy and it is easily to make it right- a 3rd order polynomial would be a near perfect curve fit. I don’t see it as a bell curve though, I see it as a forward loaded curve with a decay.
I don’t see it as a bell curve though, I see it as a forward loaded curve with a decay
Yeah, but I figured generally people are more familiar with Bell curves. Up, down, looks like bell… or hill… Give it a long tail, and there you go. Maybe an armadillo curve?
Disheartening to hear that the other pumps take the lazy route, too, not just Dash. Is there not a single insulin-dependent diabetic on all those engineering teams?
So lazy. It makes me crazy too if it’s any consolation. There was 1 on a potential lantus bio similar project about 8 years ago. I told the quality director that I would test the engineering batch personally and she almost fainted. Good times.
Whoa, you jogged one very rusty old memory there, @joe. In the 90s I used to ride the commuter shuttle with a diabetic who worked at Medtronic. We would talk “shop” - diabetes management, adventures, frustrations, news, gizmos, yadda - but he did sort of subtly talk up the benefits of working there. How different a life would I be living now if I had let him recommend me for a job there, too?
hi @wadawabbit, I worked with that quality group for years, the director and I got along, but she did forbid me from touching the product until it was tested by our actual labs, as a joke. The project never got off the ground - we did make actual (but untested) ‘biosimilar’ lantus which was cool for me to be involved with, but in order for the manufacturing plant to be viable we would have had to expand the factory 4x and with the costs involved (some people think making insulin is easy) we could not make the numbers work. We sold the equipment assemblies to a another company and I do think they added our equipment to their factory, it might be used in one of the newer approved Insulin Glargine generic/biosimilar factories.
@theNoz I guess we never really know what would have happened if we made that “left turn at Albuquerque” (bugs bunny reference) I am sure you went on and the things that happened were fine. I like making medicine, it connects me with this unfinished business of having an incurable disease. A condition which I am not at ease with, though I have accepted it decades ago. I think a “customer” always brings good energy to a manufacturing line, or laboratory. All the projects I’ve been involved with the last 25 years - all have this particular T1’s input and perspective and that perspective as well as my training have served me well so far.
I tried Lispro for a month and I saw zero noticeable difference. With the way even eating the same thing and starting at the same glucose level can end up with different results, I personally can not make a case for there being any difference. Do not get me wrong, I wish all of them worked much faster. Knowing big pharma, they oversold Novo and Huma and saw a way to make more money and did nothing to make it faster but just enough to call it different. Lispro is not even approved for Medtronic pumps but I didnt tell them I was using it for 3 weeks.
