Get a grip and calm down
There it is right on page B4 of the Wall Street Journal “Outage Threatens Care for Child Diabetics”. The article states;
“Parents of young diabetes patients say they haven’t been getting crucial readings from blood-sugar monitors worn by their children since early Saturday.
The technological breakdown, the origin of which isn’t certain, threatens the proper care of the young diabetes patients.
DexCom Inc., which makes the continuous blood-sugar monitors, said in statements on its website and Facebook that it is experiencing an issue with a feature called DexCom Follow that may cause users to not receive blood-sugar data or alerts. As of Sunday afternoon, the San Diego company hadn’t fully restored the data-sharing service, it said.”
One analyst has already put out a note on this and of course everyone is going gaga on social media. Now before we go any further let us state emphatically that in the world we now live in where all the toys talk to the cloud this sort of thing is going to happen occasionally. There is nothing wrong with the Dexcom sensor and this should in no way hurt future sales of the sensor.
Naturally the street is overreacting to this news with shares of Dexcom opening lower today as trading begins.
As Momma Kliff would say it’s time to get a grip and calm down. Yes, it’s unfortunate this happened but the fact that this event is getting such attention points to just how critical CGM has become and to us is further evidence that when it comes to glucose monitoring CGM rules.
Now if people really want to get up in arms over something think of any patient using the crappy Medtronic sensor, a sensor which unlike the Dexcom sensor does not deliver accurate readings consistently and has been known to fail frequently. A sensor which is part of the way cool whiz bang 670G system which when it works is great but when it doesn’t can be lethal.
Yes in a perfect world no medical device would fail or malfunction. In a perfect world connectivity with the cloud would be seamless and work 100% of the time. However we do not live in a perfect world. We live in a world where these devices do fail or malfunction. We live in a world, as anyone with a smartphone knows, connectivity is not always seamless.
Bottom line here is that everyone needs to follow Mom’s advice and get a grip. This is not like my Fighting Illini losing to Northwestern over the weekend or my beloved Chicago Bears playoff hopes being on life support. Heck if people really want something to bitch about think of the poor Alabama fans who watched their beloved Tide lose to archrival Auburn after one very questionable call and a missed field goal. Or what about the poor Michigan fans who had to watch their beloved Wolverines get crushed by their archrival Ohio State yet again.
Sooner or later everyone is just going to have accept the fact that these issues are going to happen. No we don’t like it but in the grand scope of things this particular issue is really a non-issue.
