South Asian Health beliefs about Diabetes

Again, I think there is certainly belief in the ancient medicines and so on, and people often believe that, for example, having a spoonful of olive oil daily will cure your diabetes or eating turmeric, you know, a spoon, half a spoonful of turmeric powder would cure you. And side effects of modern medicine, the bad publicity is that, you know, with the side effects that, you know, they do this, this, this, and people, and you know how it is now, any medication, paracetamol you pick up, and there's a long list of anything from headache to cancer, so people tend to sort of focus more on the worst side effects rather than like ones. And that's, so they seem to pay more attention to the herbal medicine or even to homeopathic medicine rather than the modern medicine. And I know of people who would actually take, bring for example they get metformin regularly and they bring it home and they think I'll have it when my blood glucose level is high so I'll just pop a pill in my mouth and I'll be cured and again it's you know not understanding the way that modern medicine works you know it's different with insulin but with metformin or you know dapagliflozin or piogliflozin or whatever they don't all work the same way. So I think it's education is needed on that side as well. And then there is this belief in these so-called hakims. People go from here to Pakistan for example to see this hakim who's got no qualifications but he's got a name for himself so he so you know they will go to him and whatever powder he he you know prescribed for them they will they will have it rather than take modern medicine that's another really barrier that we need to and and we need to tackle this but but you have to be careful because what I found is that sometimes people get offended very easily and you know if you don't use the right kind of terminology and I just want to quote one thing when I was being interviewed on the TV, Asian TV channel and we were talking about reasons for why diabetes type 2 is so prominent within the South Asian community and among other examples I gave one of first cousin marriages and I nearly got crucified for saying that, how dare you, you know, even my own family members, you know, there's like look at me look at so and so look and so that you know they're all first cousin marriages nobody's you know died because of that and nobody um so we so i learned to to paraphrase that the next time so i don't usually say now that the first cousin marriages are bad um so you know the approach is very very important and and sensitivity um based on how people feel about the religious and cultural beliefs, whether or not there's any truth in these beliefs, they just seem to associate themselves, they think this is part of my religion or you know this is part of my culture, so we need to really approach that in a sensitive way.