Rachel Hilliard, Advanced Practice Provider, discussed the practical side of the Diabetes Care treatment program. She stated, “Once you decide you’d like to give this a whirl, you see Dr. Miller, you get your lab, you’re found to be a candidate for the program, then you come, and you start your first infusion.”
Hilliard outlined the timeline of the treatment program. She explained for the first two weeks, patients will be in therapy twice a week and each infusion, administered through an IV, takes about three hours. After that, patients have treatments weekly for approximately three months.
Following the weekly therapy, Hilliard said, “We try to start tapering you down to back you off that, maybe every three weeks – (we) just keep inching you back as long as you don’t have symptoms that recur, and you feel good.”
She added, “We have what we call quarterly reviews, so very three months, we try to get your lab again and go back over the things that were giving you trouble at the beginning, see what your baseline was, where you are now, and how much you have improved.”
Hilliard said the more critical cases could require a patient to have weekly therapy for years. “But it has also kept them off of dialysis, so we’re pretty proud of that.”