ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the practicalities that young people with diabetes have to face in their everyday living. It also discusses the young person’s advocate perspective to bring a different perspective to this problem. As highlighted in the earlier chapters, the goals of diabetes management are essentially those of adequate control of blood glucose while maintaining a high quality of life. Attaining good diabetes control on a single day is a great achievement, but one that inevitably requires the need to do it all over again the following day - and the next. It can be argued that this lack of understanding includes the vast majority of healthcare professionals managing diabetes in the young. While other chronic conditions in children and adolescents may be more visible, more disabling, have greater daily symptoms and be more life-threatening, no other chronic condition is as oppressive as diabetes in the constancy of its demands.
