When Polly Varnado’s 9-year-old daughter was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, it didn’t take long for the family to hear about insulin pumps.
In September 2012, the girl picked out a purple one – her favorite color.
Over the next seven months, she proceeded to be hospitalized four times in a McComb, Mississippi medical center with high blood sugar. But when Varnado asked about all her daughter’s problems, she said, her doctor blamed user error.
“They said it wasn’t the insulin pump, it was my daughter,” said Varnado, who became a registered nurse so that she could better care for the girl.
When it comes to medical devices, none have had more reported problems over the last decade than insulin pumps, a product that’s used by hundreds of thousands of diabetics around the world, many of them children.
Collectively, insulin pumps and their components are responsible for the highest overall number of malfunction, injury and death reports in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s medical device database, according to an Associated Press analysis of reports since 2008.
(AP)
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I’d like to see some of the data this report is based on. The overwhelming majority of insulin pump users will tell you that it has greatly enhanced their quality of life. Someone with diabetes can kill themselves due to user error with a needle injection too (there was a nurse in the early 80s who killed patients by injecting them with too much insulin), or not enough and go into DKA and get seriously ill. the report as is, looks like shoddy investigation.
“When it comes to medical devices, none have had more reported problems over the last decade than insulin pumps, a product that’s used by hundreds of thousands of diabetics around the world, many of them children.”
Naturally, the most complaints, will come from the the most widely used product sector in the home use, medical device sector, especially devices that are used by children, often without adult supervision.