Jon Honeyball tastes blood – and wants the NHS to turn it into actionable data as soon as possible

If Wikipedia is to be believed, then “Ipsa

Scientia potestas est” first appeared in Sir Francis Bacon’s Meditationes Sacrae of 1597. Scraping the barrel of my O-level Latin, it means “knowledge itself is power”, which is my current train of thought.

If you look at the wide range of illnesses that face the NHS, type 2 diabetes (T2D) is arguably the most worrying. I’ve seen numbers that suggest up to a third of the population will end up with some sort of T2D, and the health cost for this is almost incalculable.

I was diagnosed back in the summer of 2010. A year earlier, my blood picture and sugar levels were fine, but in that intervening 12 months my father’s health had taken a turn for the worst and died of dementia. As his full-time carer, my stress levels were extreme, and it simply collapsed my immune system. Of course, I was a high-risk target anyway, being the “Three Fs” – “fair skin, fat and forties”.

Since diagnosis I’ve been exploring the downward slope of metformin, gliclazide and other concoctions. So far I’ve managed to stay away from insulin injection, which appears to be a health “Hotel California” – you can start there, but you can never leave. If I’m lucky, and my parents are smiling down on me from their cloud, there might be a stem-cell solution coming in the future.

In the meantime, anyone with T2D has the quarterly nightmare of the GP visit for the HbA1c test, which monitors average blood sugar levels over the previous month. You can do finger pricking at home with test strips and a meter, but it’s both painful and a point-in-time value. Frankly, it’s barely worth the effort other than to ensure you’re not below a value of five and thus culpably liable if driving.

T2D is a mess of medication and confusing messages. Your doctor tells you to lose weight, but then admits that gliclazide causes you to put on weight. You can try very low calorific diets and many report good results, although that seems to apply more in the early stages than the later ones like mine.

But a few months ago I had an epiphany: the FreeStyle Libre system. This is a small batterypowered sensor about the size of a £2 coin. It sits on your arm, with a very sticky underside in contact with the skin. A tiny needle goes into your arm tissue and measures the interstitial blood sugar level. You have a small reader that you wave next to the sensor, and it transfers the data down to the reader. It stores the value every 15 minutes, and the sensor has enough storage for about eight hours of data. The reader has effectively unlimited storage, from which you can download raw data and a range of useful reports in PDF format. After a fortnight, you peel off the sensor and throw it away, replacing it with a new one. Its battery only lasts about a fortnight anyway.

Monitoring my blood sugar level in real-time has been transformative. Just taking the simple report of “high, normal and low” where “normal” is the normal 5.6 to 8.5 millimoles per litre (mmol for short), the change has been profound. I have gone from 63% high/34% normal/3% low over 90 days to 56%/40%/4% over the last 30 days, to 49%/44%/7% over the last 14 days, to 39%/53%/8% over the last seven days. Note the steady growth of that “normal” figure. Once you can immediately get feedback of your body’s response to food and drug intake, you quickly learn what causes high spikes and what doesn’t. Comparing this to diet instructions sheets from my GP is like comparing the internet to cave drawings.

I’m now looking forward to my next GP visit because my HbA1c value should have significantly dropped, which is good news all round. Maybe I will be able to decrease my drug load for the first time in seven years. Given that this system is so transformative I can’t recommend it highly enough. The only downside is the cost – £50 a fortnight for each sensor isn’t cheap. But I’ve switched from being a passenger to being the pilot of my diabetes, and that can’t have a price tag attached. I understand that the Libre system will be available for free to type 1 injecting diabetes users at the end of the year. But this technology, or an equivalent, needs a national rollout.

Now, what to do with the data? Imagine taking all this information from the population, and aligning it to food intake, drug intake and personal physical profile. And doing so for prediabetic and even healthy people, as well as those who are reliant on medication. The opportunity to throw science and engineering at this problem is undeniable. But who will take up the challenge at the scale needed to transform healthcare?

I’ve switched from being a passenger to being the pilot of my diabetes, and that can’t have a price tag

Jon Honeyball is a contributing editor to He can’t wait for the body scanner at JFK Airport to go ping over the sensor. Email jon@jonhoneyball.com