Picking The Diabetes Forum For You

One of the most painful aspects of diabetes is that you seem to be the only one in the world with diabetes. You might be the only one in your family, job or community with diabetes. And this can make you depressed, which can aggravate your illness.

But you are not alone. If you have online access, you can hook up instantly to a diabetes forum, where those with diabetes all around the world can share problems and solutions. But, if you enter diabetes forum in a search engine, you are likely to come up with hundreds, if not thousands of separate diabetes forums. Does that mean you have to join them all? No, of course not. By using your common sense and a little patience, you can soon pick the diabetes forum for you.

Narrowing Down The Field

First off, what type of diabetes do you have? Type I or Type II? The advice and treatments will differ dramatically according to what type of diabetes is being discussed. If you don t know, you MUST go to a doctor for a proper diagnosis. After knowing what type of diabetes you have, you can then move on to ask other questions of you re your kind of diabetes situation:

What age are you? There are diabetes forums which are just for children or just for adults.
How are you getting treated? There are diabetes forums that will stick with conventional medicine, and some that will combine alternative and holistic medicine.
How active is the forum? If the last post was over a month ago, then the forum members are unlikely to answer any questions you may have soon.
Look at the posts topics already on the diabetes forum. Does it sound like the forum members are going through the same problems you are? If they are, you ve found your forum.

Joining An Online Forum

It s free to join an online diabetes forum well, unless you ignore the cost of getting a computer and internet access! You should NEVER be asked for personal information like your credit card number, driver s license number or social security number. The only things you usually need to give are:

Your name (which usually doesn t appear in your posts)
Your email address
A password that you make up yourself
Anything else is voluntary

Online forums can be a real joy. Not only do you discover you are not alone, but you can make some nice friendships.