As someone who has worked tangentially to drug discovery and who has many friends who work as scientists in pharma, I promise you this is outright false. No scientist or even evil business/lawyer person for pharma is out to suppress known cures for disease in order to make a buck.
This entirely leaves aside the notion that diabetes (abbreviating as DM2 for diabetes mellitus type 2) is a solved problem. If you can maintain a low calorie diet or a water fast, then yes you will improve and may not benefit from medication. The number of people who can do that sustainably is rather small, as evidenced by the number of people who get the disease in the first place. It's not like it's a mystery that excess caloric intake and weight gain are the major risk factors for DM2.
It's also not a mystery to the patient, they know they should probably cut back a little, but it turns out that diets are extremely difficult to maintain long term. See:
So for those people who have difficulty maintaining drastic weight loss for whatever reason, I think it's ok to have a pharmaceutical industry that tries to find alternatives. If an individual patient can do without the drugs, that's great too. In the end, lives will be saved with both approaches, they are not in conflict.
This entirely leaves aside the notion that diabetes (abbreviating as DM2 for diabetes mellitus type 2) is a solved problem. If you can maintain a low calorie diet or a water fast, then yes you will improve and may not benefit from medication. The number of people who can do that sustainably is rather small, as evidenced by the number of people who get the disease in the first place. It's not like it's a mystery that excess caloric intake and weight gain are the major risk factors for DM2.
It's also not a mystery to the patient, they know they should probably cut back a little, but it turns out that diets are extremely difficult to maintain long term. See:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/magazine/tara-parker-pope-...
So for those people who have difficulty maintaining drastic weight loss for whatever reason, I think it's ok to have a pharmaceutical industry that tries to find alternatives. If an individual patient can do without the drugs, that's great too. In the end, lives will be saved with both approaches, they are not in conflict.