How to Treat a Comatose Diabetic

Diabetics can be in coma for several reasons, none of which you as the first contact needs to know about except hypoglycemia.

• You need to give SUGAR to rouse any comatose diabetic irrespective of what the cause is.

• Hypoglycemia is low glucose in the blood.

• This is very life threatening and low levels of sugar for as little as five minutes have profound and detrimental effect on the brain.

• The brain can use nothing for energy other than glucose.

• No glucose no energy, no brain survival and brain death is a natural consequence.

• The rest of you (heart, lung, kidney name it) can survive on fat and protein but the stubborn brain won’t take any and will die before bending an inch.

• This (hypoglycemia)is opposite to what diabetes is and would have probably been caused by taking insulin and not eating quick enough or not at all.

• Insulin of the past (actraphane) used to need time lapse between injection and eating as the drug took time before starting to act.

• This would as you can imagine cause lots of problems if food gets delayed for whatever reason after injecting yourself.

• Fortunately medicine evolves, one can now eat and inject simultaneously with novomix.

• This has greatly reduced the rate of hypoglycemia related to the balancing act that in the first world used to be taken for granted.

One cannot emphasize this enough but I will repeat it once more, you need to drink or eat sugar, sweets even coke irrespective of my pathological dislike of soft drinks and related high GI foods.

In the more likely event that the patient has hyperglycemia, (increased sugar) no damage is done as the problem making the patient comatose is the ketosis.
The added sugar that you gave in case you feel bad has no effect on this.

The other less common type of coma is caused by increased sugar with dehydration of the brain as the primary cause.
Adding sugar will have minimal effect on the hydration of the brain either.
Only the hospital can deal with it and time though important is not as critical as in hypoglycemia.

You still have cellular hypoglycemia in the latter but enough sneaks in to keep the brain ticking for longer.
Take nothing from this but the fact that you need glucose to wake a diabetic in coma, no test, no brain function, no deduction, and I will sleep a happy teacher.


If biochemistry and physiology of health are the elements of">beauty and health. we unlikely to complicate further.