#also if you want to cry go and read about the first children that banting and best treated

[bonefall]

type 2 diabetes can be treated without insulin. im just on metaformin and some other medications, no insulin pump/injections yet thankfully

OH this ask reminds me to mention I've been looking at cat diabetes from the corner of my eyes as I work on 4435435 other things (send help)

Cat diabetes has very different trends than human diabetes, so I'm trying to hit a 'balance' between reflecting it for the diabetic human beings in the audience, versus the accuracy of cat diabetes

Because, Type 2 Diabetes in cats is treated the same way as Type 1-- insulin injections. Unlike humans who can take oral supplements like metformin, pancreas-affecting medications have a weird quirk in felines where they cause the cat pancreas to throw a tantrum, say "I DUN WANNA" and swap over to Type 1 Diabetes.

Meanwhile if you just treat Type 2 Feline Diabetes with insulin, the cat pancreas can sometimes go "oh oopsie woopsie" and just... stop having diabetes.

Why, you ask, you beg, does the cat pancreas act this way? Science doesn't know. Their organs are just jerks.

So that leaves me sitting here considering what to do-- because Metformin specifically is derived from Goat's Rue. Naturalized basically everywhere. Dangling right in front of my nose is the easy pharmacognological basis of Metformin, the specific thing that the Type 2 Diabetics in my audience have been telling me they take, and this solution is so simple it's almost painful.

But off in the horizon looms Type 1 Diabetes, which logically would be the one way the cats would want to treat all forms of diabetes... and I still need to work out how exactly they're going to get this INTO the patient while still being canon-compliant.

The earliest IVs were made of bladders and feathers, incredibly crude but still effective, and both of which are easy to get... maybe a cat was taken by a human and given an IV injection and that's where they got the spark of the idea? Long ago?

And making insulin... I've found some absolutely fascinating things about the early production of insulin, but the problem is the chemical separation of animal insulin from the digestive juices produced within the pancreas.

I think a cat with their sense of smell just doing dissections, with a LIIITTLE bit of an extra stretch, could tell there was something different about the islet structures inside of the organ... but how would they know the pancreas is connected to the development of diabetes? Would they be able to experiment enough to find out that freezing the pancreas separates the digestive enzymes from the insulin?

I'm still batting it all around though

#also if you want to cry go and read about the first children that banting and best treated #oh my god #Diabetes #Warrior cats #Herb Guide #Bone babble #type 1 diabetes was 100% fatal