DiabetesMine: Leading Online Resource for Real Life with Diabetes

 

My name is Amy Tenderich and I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in May of 2003. At the time, I had a 5-year-old, a 3-year-old, and a five-month-old baby at home, and was almost too consumed with caring for them and trucking them around (many trips to Costco!) to get my head around this new medical condition that would require me to test my own blood sugar levels and take insulin for the rest of my life. Say what?!

The whole first year was pretty miserable, with my glucose levels skyrocketing and plummeting as I struggled to understand how to balance my food and activity with the medications I was taking. Above all, I felt isolated and uninformed. Doctor’s visits only left me feeling more so.

At some point in late 2004, a light bulb went on: I needed to connect with other people walking in my diabetes shoes, and I needed a much better channel into relevant information about real life with diabetes to help with the basics, like: What are good snacks? How do I keep my insulin cool in the summer? What choices do I have of glucose meters, insulin pumps, logging programs and other tools? And how useful are various brands and products in the daily lives of people like me?

Back then, social media was just emerging, so the kind of connection and information-sharing between patients that I craved didn’t yet exist.  So I set out to help build it myself!

With that came the birth of my site DiabetesMine.com, now a leading information resource and networking destination for people effected by diabetes. (We were named the No. 1 diabetes influencer site in America by ShareCare last year.)

The name DiabetesMine is a play-on words for “it’s mine, I’m stuck with it,” and “a gold mine of straight talk and encouragement for people touched by diabetes.”

I began by sharing my personal struggles with diabetes. And with a background in journalism, I put on my reporter hat and treated diabetes like my “beat” at a newspaper, attending industry events and reporting on what I was learning.

Soon I was also publishing testimonials from other patients and their loved ones, as well as news analyses that aimed to “look behind the headlines” on all the confusing mainstream media coverage of diabetes – like what impact will the latest “scientific breakthrough” have on our D-lives, if any?

With industry news, I made it my aim to act as a “consumer watchdog” for the patient community, i.e. are pharmaceutical and other companies acting ethically in their marketing to us PWDs (web shorthand for “people with diabetes”)?

By and For PWDs

DiabetesMine.com quickly grew into a must-visit resource for patients, caregivers and folks in the medical and pharma industries. We now have a small team of passionate writers, all living with diabetes themselves.

In short, we were never satisfied with the “official” information we found online about our illness, so we set out to apply our collective backgrounds in journalism and communications to create our own news site, by and for patients.

We publish 7 days a week, striving every day to bring some key pieces of information to our fellow PWDs, and provide a few laughs along the way. We firmly believe that having a sense of humor is essential to surviving with this exasperating disease.

Some regular editorial series that you can find at DiabetesMine include:

• Our super-popular (and snarky!) weekly diabetes advice column, Ask D’Mine
• Book Reviews/Giveaways
• Our Small But Mighty series, on diabetes mom-and-pop businesses
• Our Global Diabetes series, direct from PWDs around the world
• Exclusive Guest Posts and Guest Posts specific to Type 2 diabetes
• Our Partner Follies series, airing the voices of PWDs’ loved ones
• Our 411 Information series on diabetes complications
• Our Amazing Diabetes Advocates series, featuring local heroes
• Our Sunday Funnies diabetes comics – laugh, don’t cry!
• “WeAreNotWaiting” for diabetes innovation *

*Note: We also host a series of events focused on diabetes technology in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Video Product Reviews, Too!

Think about it: you can easily find customer reviews for everything from cowboy boots to roofing materials, but where in the past could you EVER get real-life feedback from other patients using various medical treatments?

We believe it’s critical for people to be able share their experiences with the most important products in their lives — the diabetes tools that preserve their health.

So we recently launched a new video review hub called the DiabetesMine Test Kitchen, where we invite patients to submit 3-5 minute videos critiquing all manner of products aimed at improving life with diabetes: glucose meters, insulin pumps, snack foods, data logging software and apps, exercise aids, medical jewelry and more. The videos are filmed in the reviewer’s kitchen, where so much of diabetes care (and life) takes place!

These videos give patients access to down-to-earth perspectives they’ll never get from any corporate website, nor from any doctor.  They also provide raw, real-world feedback to the makers of these products, ideally aiding them in improving their designs and offerings to better meet patients’ needs.

You’ll Dig the ‘Mine

For many thousands of people living with diabetes, having access to a whole new world of connections via the Internet is transforming the experience of being a patient from a horribly isolating one of hopelessness and helplessness to a more positive, social experience that helps them feel understood, informed and empowered. We’re proud to be part of that movement!

We hope you’ll take some time to explore the ‘Mine, which features a ton of rich information on everything from breaking diabetes news to book reviews (with giveaways!), to product reviews, analyses of headlines and research, interviews with luminaries, feature stories on inspiring people and advocacy projects, stories from loved ones of diabetics and accounts of living with diabetes from around the world.

We call the site “a diabetes newspaper with a personal twist” – a news source and friendly destination that provides “straight talk” on diabetes you won’t find anywhere else.

Kind Regards,

Amy Tenderich

Founder & Editor of DiabetesMine.com (living with type 1 since 2003)