Benefits of Insulin Pump Therapy
(3) Pump therapy represents the best that medical science has to offer for controlling type 1 diabetes.
Pump therapy may also be useful for some patients with gestational diabetes and with type 2 diabetes.
(4) Pumps make it easier to achieve tight control than injections because of the more predictable nature of using only short-acting insulin.
Pumps also provide a level of schedule freedom that you simply can't get with injection therapy. For anyone who is having difficulty controlling blood sugars due to unpredictable schedules, pumps can often make a difference. For example, pumps can allow teens (or most anyone) to sleep late without risking hypo- or hyperglycemia.
(5) For people who count carbohydrates and calculate bolus doses, pumps offer freedom to eat on their schedule, not the schedule dictated by long-acting insulin.
People on traditional injection therapy may sometimes speak of “chasing their insulin” – eating carbohydrates to raise blood sugar levels due to the affects of their long-acting insulin regime. Because insulin pumps use fast-acting insulin, there is less of a need for “insulin chasing” by consuming additional carbohydrates.
(6) Precise.
Pump technology allows insulin to be delivered in precise increments, which provides more accurate delivery than is possible with an insulin syringe.(7) Predictable.
Fast-acting insulin is prescribed for use in the pump, which means the action of the insulin and its peak effectiveness are very predictable. For example, with Humalog® and NovoLog®, two widely-used insulins in pumps, the effectiveness peaks in about 30 minutes. In contrast, the action of daily injections of intermediate or long-acting insulin is more difficult to predict.