391
Seven Diabetes Patients Die Due to Undisclosed Bug in Abbott's Continuous Glucose Monitors
(sfconservancy.org)
this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2025
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Technology
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Dexcom is more reliable.
Unfortunately I am severely allergic to the adhesive Dexcom uses that they claim is hypoallergenic.
From what I know about the US, this entire thread seems like a wet dream of a lawyer working on commission.
Nah, the pharmaceutical companies have covered themselves via reams of fine print. Using any of the GCMs (or pumps for that matter) means signing away all your legal protections and even if it didn't the companies have billion dollar lawyers that can easily crush any case brought against them. Unless you're a multimillionaire you literally can't afford to sue any of them.
That's the real flaw with the current US legal system (the civil one at least), individuals can't afford to bring cases against large corporations. Class action cases can make it possible, but even then the odds are in the favor of the corporations and even if you win nobody actually makes anything off of those besides the lawyers. Typically the lawyers take 50% of the judgement off the top and by the time you divvy up the remaining 50% among all the participants it's at most a few hundred bucks each if even that.
Does that include protection from false advertising, eh?
That's a misprint. It's supposed to say hyperallergenic.
(/s, in case that wasn't obvious)
Do adhesive barriers help at all? I live off the Smith and nephew one
I'm allergic to many of the barriers as well. There is one I found that I'm not allergic to and it does help a lot but it's not perfect. Near the end of the 14 day period the area the unit was inserted would often start itching and when removed would show signs of irritation.
More importantly though I found the Dexcom units to be worse than the Abbott ones in some ways. The Libre 3 has a fall off where it starts reading fairly accurately and then progressively reads lower and lower over time in a linear fashion. The Dexcom G2 on the other hand would start off somewhat inaccurate which could be corrected using a couple of manual glucose readings, but then as time went by it would get progressively more inaccurate in a random direction and no amount of recalibration using manual glucose readings would fix that.
Dexcom claims the margin of error is 20% and will replace any unit that starts reading outside that range, but at least for me that was literally every unit at some point. Some of them that was right out of the box, some of them that was after 5 days, but it always happened and it was unpredictable. I find the predictable decline of the Abbott units preferable to the random inaccuracy of the Dexcom units. At least with the Libre 3 I can estimate how far off the reading is based on how long I've been using it, with the G2 it was a complete crap shoot on whether the reading was accurate or not at any given time.
The Dexcom G2 is far more uncomfortable compared to the Libre 2, in my experience. The filament causes a red spot and aching in my arm, but the Libre 2's does not.
Insurance is more likely to cover the Dexcom. God bless Healthcare. 🙃