Diabetes mellitus

Something sweet moves through your body that really should not be ending up in your urine. Your blood sugar rises, your pancreas either stops producing insulin altogether or your body no longer responds properly to what it does produce. Medicine calls this diabetes mellitus — literally translated: the honey-sweet flow. Even the ancient Greeks tasted the urine of diabetics and marvelled: it was sweet. A strange, almost poetic diagnosis for a condition that accompanies millions of people today.

The medical view is clear: in type 1, the immune system destroys the insulin-producing cells — usually early in life, often in childhood or adolescence. In type 2, insulin resistance develops over years — the cells close themselves off from the hormone that would bring them sweetness. Both have clear biochemical mechanisms. And both, beyond that, have a language the body speaks.