Comment on Seven Diabetes Patients Die Due to Undisclosed Bug in Abbott's Continuous Glucose Monitors

• orclev@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I’m allergic to many of the barriers as well. There is one I found that I’m not allergic to and it does help a lot but it’s not perfect. Near the end of the 14 day period the area the unit was inserted would often start itching and when removed would show signs of irritation.

  More importantly though I found the Dexcom units to be worse than the Abbott ones in some ways. The Libre 3 has a fall off where it starts reading fairly accurately and then progressively reads lower and lower over time in a linear fashion. The Dexcom G2 on the other hand would start off somewhat inaccurate which could be corrected using a couple of manual glucose readings, but then as time went by it would get progressively more inaccurate in a random direction and no amount of recalibration using manual glucose readings would fix that.

  Dexcom claims the margin of error is 20% and will replace any unit that starts reading outside that range, but at least for me that was literally every unit at some point. Some of them that was right out of the box, some of them that was after 5 days, but it always happened and it was unpredictable. I find the predictable decline of the Abbott units preferable to the random inaccuracy of the Dexcom units. At least with the Libre 3 I can estimate how far off the reading is based on how long I’ve been using it, with the G2 it was a complete crap shoot on whether the reading was accurate or not at any given time.

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