Prediabetes Is Not Pregnancy — On Thresholds, Continuums, and the Fraud of a Category
Some conditions have no middle ground. A woman is pregnant or she is not; there is no partially pregnant, no early-stage gestation you could plausibly wave off. Diabetes is not that kind of condition, and yet the word “prediabetes” is built to sound like it is — a second diagnosis, a separate room you get moved into before the real one. Patients hear the prefix and smell a racket: yesterday you were fine, today a lab value nudges past a line someone drew, and suddenly you have a disease you didn’t have last week. The suspicion is reasonable. The biology it’s aimed at is not what people think it is. …