Keeping track of blood sugar levels is essential to diabetes management. It is simply impossible to treat… or prevent… hypoglycemia and hyperglycemia and to evaluate the effectiveness of your prescribed medication and eating plan, if you don’t know your blood sugars. For well-controlled diabetics, it may be OK to take blood sugar levels just once a week. For diabetics including type 2’s on insulin, and for anyone who has type 2 diabetes together with an infection such as a cold or flu, it may be necessary to check these sugar levels literally ten times a day.

Blood sugar levels, however, don’t tell diabetics everything they need to know about diabetes control. Here are some additional, essential measurement tools that should be in every diabetic’s medicine cabinet.

Bath thermometer: Especially if you have been diabetic for 10 years or more, diabetes can cause impaired sensation in your hands or feet. Countless diabetics scald themselves without even knowing it.

A bath thermometer can literally save a limb, especially if you have poor circulation. Bath thermometers are available through most drugstores, although they may have to order them for you.

Clinistix or Diastix: If want to know if a “sugar-free” food is really sugar-free, test with Clinistix or Diastix. Put a tiny amount of the food into your mouth and mix with saliva. Then spit the food and saliva onto the test strip.

Any color change indicates starch or sugar. Many diabetics are surprised to learn that bouillon, ketchup, “sugar-free” cookies, and countless other supposedly sugar-free foods are actually loaded with sugar.

These test strips can also tell you if your blood sugar levels are so high that sugar is spilling over into your urine… just hold the strip in your urine stream and look for a change in color. Since your kidneys don’t remove glucose from the bloodstream until blood sugars reach 250mg/dL (14mmol/L) or greater, any reaction of the test strip indicates a need for better diabetes control. Clinistix or Diastix are also available at drugstores.

Ketostix: Ketostix show color changes that measure ketones in the urine. Ketones, which are produced when your body can’t or doesn’t use glucose for fuel, signals that you are in danger of the most serious complication of uncontrolled high blood sugars, dehydration.

If you feel sick and aren’t eating, your body will use stored fat for energy and produce “moderate” levels of ketones. If you have some other diabetic issue and your blood sugar levels are also running very, very high, then you are likely to have “high” levels of ketones.

Taking aspirin can cause false positives when you use Ketostix, so you don’t need to call your doctor unless you have both high ketone levels and high blood sugar levels. Any color change in Ketostix indicating high ketone levels, however, combined with blood sugars over 200mg/dL (11mmol/L) is a sign you need to see your doctor.

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