Professionals

If you are a health care professional and you don’t know quite where to begin, we have listed a few of our top recommendations as to where to start. We have kept this list deliberately short.

Deprescribing

Perhaps the most important topic for health care professionals is deprescribing for T2DM patients. The real food, low carb approach can be so effective that patients can become over-medicated and run the risk of hypoglycaemia if they are on insulin or sulfonylureas if they are not being monitored carefully. Due to the very rare risk of ketoacidosis in type 2 insulin insufficient patients, you may wish to consider stopping any SGLT2i medication, particularly if the patient is of normal weight.

Please have a look at this paper, published in the BJGP, which as far as we are concerned is the definitive guide on this subject.

When we started involving our Primary Care Network Pharmacy team, we developed a deprescribing flow chart that they have found helpful. Please have a look and feel free to download a copy if you think it might help.

Also, please have a look at this more recent paper on deprescribing.

Getting started

Dr David Cavan, UK Consultant Endocrinolgoist, runs some excellent courses for professionals as an introduction to low carbohydrate management of type 2 diabetes. Further information.

Another excellent paper “A clinician’s guide to inpatient low carbohydrate diets for remission of type 2 diabetes” gives a great overview for clinicians in an outpatient setting too. In particular, we recommend pages 14 to 21, which addresses the real basics and many FAQs that clinicians commonly have (e.g. regarding concerns about saturated fat etc).

If you are looking for a bit more detail, then please have a look at the excellent Society of Metabolic Heath Practitioners’ Clinical Guidelines for Therapeutic Carbohydrate Restriction.

Finally, if you are looking for a bit of inspiration, if you haven’t seen it before, we highly recommend spending 18 minutes watching this TED Talk by Dr Sarah Hallberg.

That’s all for now!

Note: If you would like to promote the Freshwell Low Carb Project in your practice, then you would be welcome to download this A4 poster to get you started.