Traditional books eBooks Prescribe a book Order now Red Blood cell factoids Future books Resources

E verything you ever wanted to know about Continuous Glucose Monitoring for Diabetes (but didn't know to ask) Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM), the revolutionary technology that’s poised to completely change diabetes care, gives you a unique peak beneath your skin, revealing what your blood sugar is doing—day and night and night and day. Beyond Fingersticks covers the history, science, biology, and technical details behind these systems. The author has left no stone unturned in helping you cope with the nuts and bolts of daily living with CGM systems, from choosing alarm thresholds that really work, to successful calibration, to affording a system, to dealing with the volumes of data they create. How to wear, travel, sleep with, and think about CGM—it’s all here for you. Yep. Even sex wearing CGM. Fingersticks author William “Lee” Dubois has been writing about CGM for years on the internet at LifeAfterDx;and is widely regarded as the ultimate expert in integrating this exciting new technology into real life. If you are a fan of his online writing, you’ll recognize this new book’s title, which pays homage to his often-quoted post that summarized his accumulated CGM knowledge in a simple set of ten rules that where a creative take-off of Sun Tzu’s classic Art of War. But rest assured, this is no rehash. Lee has stepped back and looked at the entire issue from a fresh perspective. His revolutionary guide book covers virtually every aspect of continuous monitoring from the nuts-and-bolts of the technology to the psychology; Lee has left no stone unturned. Lee tells us that Beyond Fingersticks, was hands-down the hardest book he’s ever written, and that he more than once during the process considered eating rat poison. But apparently, even with Google to help, no one seems to know how many carbs rat poison has (even when suicidal, we D-folks can’t break out of our habits). The problem with the subject, according to Lee, is that there are a huge number of overlapping elements that need to be integrated with each other, but also need to be presented in proper order so the reader—at each level of the book—has the knowledge necessary to understand the new concepts. He compared it to a lawyer building a case in court; but with the added difficulty of keeping in interesting. It was like house of cards, and if you pulled out one card at the bottom, the whole damn thing came crashing down. At the same time, if you noticed a necessary card was missing from, say, the middle, inserting it risked a similar collapse. Beyond that, his book wasn’t simply trying to tell the reader how to set alarms or how to calibrate the machines; to use CGM successfully requires an entire shift in how you perceive diabetes. And if that were not enough, Lee also had to figure out how to articulate the things he’d learned to do from instinct, being one of the first people to use the systems back in the day before anyone knew how to use the systems. We’re biased, of course, but we think he did a brilliant job in sewing all the diverse threads into a beautiful tapestry. He successfully interweaves the complex themes of how CGM systems function, their history and development, how to program them, keep them working right for you, and the important new ways of thinking about diabetes and blood sugar control that are required to get the most out of this revolutionary technology. From choosing alarm thresholds that really work, to successful calibration, to affording a system, to dealing with the volumes of data they create, to how to wear, sleep, and think about CGM—Lee has covered everything. The book's foreword is penned by the noted medical doctor and artificial pancreas researcher Howard Zisser, MD of the Sansum Diabetes Research Institute. Paperback, 4” x 6.5” three hundred and fifty pages long. Need to know more? Click here to check out the table of contents! If this book were a video game it would be labeled MATURE for a sprinkling of explicit language and for deadly serious subject matter. Beyond Fingersticks is available exclusively at Red Blood Cell Books. Autographed copies available on request for the same low price! (Release date is September 1st.) Sorry, the paperback version is SOLD OUT and OUT OF PRINT. You can still get a hardback, below, or the Kindle and Audio versions at Amazon. Read reviews of, and reader feed back about, Beyond Fingersticks. A ttention book nuts: Our multi-award winning inaugural title, The Born-Again Diabetic was a “printed case” hard bound book. As book lovers we are crazy about hardcover books. But when we did the little Tiger book we realized that going the “paper” back route was best for it. It’s a pocket book, after all, and hardcover books don’t really slip into your pocket easily. So what to do about Fingersticks? In the end, economy ruled the day for the most part, and with some regret, we concluded that Fingersticks needed to be a paperback. But last minute we had the opportunity to print a limited edition run of hardcover copies of Beyond Fingersticks. It’s the identical book to the soft cover (right down to the retail bar-code price of the paper version), but lovingly bound as a case bound hardcover. Yeah, it’s twice as expensive. But it’s a hundred times more lovely. Limited Edition Hardcover version $30.00. A bout the author: Type-1 Diabetic, diabetes educator, author, William “Lee” Dubois walks in your shoes every day. He writes with honesty, compassion, and humor from both clinical and personal experience. Lee is has been called the Godfather of Continuous Glucose Monitoring. He was the 30th person in the United States to get "hooked up" to a CGM system, very shortly after the first FDA approval in 2005; and as far as anyone knows, is now the ultimate veteran, having continuously used continuous systems longer than anyone else. He is the author of our multi-award winning titleThe Born-Again Diabetic: The handbook to help you get you diabetes in control (again) and also penned the first year survival guide for the newly diagnosed Type-2 Diabetic Taming the Tiger the Tiger: You first year with Diabetes which is also available in Spanish. Photo by Dos Corazones He works full time as the Diabetes Coordinator for Pecos Valley Medical Center, a rural nonprofit clinic in one of the poorest counties in the United States, and is a tireless advocate for diabetes care and awareness. He is a Community Faculty member for the diabetes specialty program of Project ECHO at the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center, where he is engaged in teaching community health workers diabetes education skills via telemedicine. He also hosts The Diabetes B.L.U.E. Program (Basic Learning Understanding and Education), a state-wide weekly phone-in support and education program for newly diagnosed diabetics sponsored by the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center and Project ECHO. Lee sits on assorted boards and committees that deal with diabetes in his state, but he also writes to extend a helping hand to patients too far away for him to help directly. In fact, he is a prolific writer and is the author of the long-running internet blog LifeAfterDx which chronicles his experiences with the early continuous glucose monitoring technology, his thoughts on diabetes and health politics, and his daily life living with diabetes. email the publisher