Even if your hands don’t look dirty, when you don’t wash them before you test, you can screw up your result. Especially if you have handled fruit before testing, a study shows that your result could be way off.
When you wash your hands, it’s important to get your hands as hot as you can comfortably stand. The hot water makes it a lot easier to draw enough blood for the test. Researchers recommend that you wash your hands with hot water and soap, dry them, and then check your blood sugar.
The most common mistake is not getting enough blood on the test strip. After using dozens of different blood glucose meters since a doctor told me 21 years ago that I have diabetes, I know from my own experience that when I don’t get quite enough blood on the test strip, the result the meter reports will be off.
When you don’t get your hands hot enough, you have to squeeze your finger a lot to get enough blood. When you do that, you are getting some interstitial fluid rather than blood. A study shows that this “may lead to unreliable readings.”
Even though some blood glucose meter manufacturers think that you should clean your fingers with alcohol, this is a bad mistake. The experts say that this will give you a test result that it too low.
Researchers from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that old test strips give inaccurate readings, particularly if they are beyond their expiration date. While some meters will reject expired strips, not all of them will. And none of them will reject strips that are nearing their expiration dates, and that too, the CDC researchers told me, can give us inaccurate test results.
If your A1C level is above 8.4, your fasting level contributed the most to having a blood sugar level that is far too high. But testing two hours after the first bite of a meal is when those of us with well-controlled diabetes need to check our blood sugar. This is especially important when you eat more than a few grams of carbohydrate, which is the only thing that will have much effect on your level.
Few of us who have diabetes test enough. Some of us blame our health insurance companies for not paying for enough test strips. That’s not too smart because we can now get test strips for very little money. We need to test in pairs, as I wrote here a few years ago. The idea is simply to test before and after eating, before and after exercise, and before and after reducing stress, like with meditation.
These are all bad mistakes. But the worst one you can make is not learning from your test results, as I wrote at “Don’t Waste Your Time and Money on Diabetes Testing.” Use your testing to change what you do. If your level is too high, your doctor can change your prescription. You can also bring it down with exercise. But usually the biggest change to make is to change what you eat.
