Richard K. Bernstein, MD, is one of the world’s foremost experts in diabetes treatment and care. He is the first diabetic to monitor his own blood sugars, a practice that was ridiculed when he began but is common today. For thirty-five years he has been an outspoken proponent of normal blood sugars for diabetics.
In 1946, at the age of twelve, he was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. He realized in the late 1960s that he was dying from myriad complications of diabetes. Trained as an engineer, he attacked his disease as an engineer would. When the earliest blood sugar meters became available in 1969, they were available only to hospitals and doctors. He obtained one through his wife, a physician, and discovered that he could normalize his blood sugars with the help of the meter and a low-carbohydrate diet. His discoveries about diet and blood sugar normalization were dismissed by the diabetes treatment community.
Dr. Bernstein—then Mr. Bernstein—left his business career at age forty-five to secure a medical degree so that he would have the credentials to publish his findings. Over the years, he has perfected and refined his program for diabetic blood sugar normalization and has developed new methods for the treatment of type 2 as well as type 1 diabetes. This nationally bestselling book and his book The Diabetes Diet are the fruits of that work. He conducts a free teleseminar every month at www.askdrbernstein.net, during which he answers questions from medical professionals and patients.
Dr. Richard K. Bernstein currently serves as a consultant to the Arthur S. Abramson Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He is the emeritus director and former director of the department’s Peripheral Vascular Disease Clinic at Jacobi Medical Center, and is a fellow of the American College of Endocrinology, the American College of Nutrition, and the College of Certified Wound Care Specialists.