Are Insulin Injections The Only Treatment For Diabetes?

At the moment, injections of insulin are the main treatment, and these enable diabetics to eat and live normally. Most diabetics accept the need for their injections as the alternatives are much worse.

Lots of research is in progress to look at alternatives though, and injections may not always be necessary. Insulin tablets are still a remote possibility ~ providing research can find a way to enable the insulin, a protein, to avoid getting digested with all the other proteins in the diet. If special capsules and systems can be designed to deliver the insulin molecule intact into the blood through the intestine wall, we might one day see insulin in tablet form.

Another possibility is insulin inhalers ~ this seems much more likely and there is quite a lot of research going on in clinical trials to test out insulin inhalers. Insulin can be absorbed through the airways ~ and digestion is not a problem.