A tribal health clinic in Lapwai, Idaho, has helped patients find success managing diabetes and prediabetes. NWPB’s Rachel Sun joined host Connor Henricksen to discuss.
Connor Henricksen: Rachel, a recent story you reported focused on how Nimíipuu Health's diabetes management program has seen progress in treating Type 2 diabetes. What can you tell us about that?
Rachel Sun: So Nimiipuu Health is one of many tribal health clinics that has introduced a diabetes management program that tries to work specifically with Native populations to find solutions that work for them to treat Type 2 diabetes.
Native American populations have a much higher incidence rate of Type 2 diabetes than the general population, and that's for a lot of reasons that we can get into.
But this particular program offered cooking classes, exercise classes, mental health support, medication management, and just a really all-encompassing support system that allowed their patients to find a lot more success than they had previously on their own when it came to managing their blood sugar.
Henricksen: So your reporting, in part, follows a man — a very fun man, might I add — named McCoy Oatman, who was involved in the management program. Can you tell us a bit about him?
Sun: So McCoy Oatman was part of the first and second pilot that Nimiipuu Health ran for their diabetes management program.
He's a dad, he's 48 years old and for a lot of his life, he had really struggled with weight management. At his heaviest, his weight was beginning to impact his ability to do stuff with his three daughters. He also got to a point where he was prediabetic.
McCoy started this pilot program and found that having that added support was really beneficial in finding a consistent way to manage his weight and manage his blood sugar.
And so through all of this, he was able to lose about 80 pounds and actually keep it off for the first time. He also is no longer pre-diabetic. Last year, he did a 5K with his daughter, and he was really proud of that.
Henricksen: That's a dramatic improvement. So you mentioned earlier that Native Americans have a higher rate of Type 2 diabetes. Why is that?
Sun: Yeah, so there's a lot of potential causes, and the exact reasons might vary person to person. But one of them is that food insecurity and food deserts can often make it harder to eat healthier and make choices that are going to be better for your blood sugar levels.
A lot of reservations are in food deserts. Lapwai, which is the town where these individuals are based, has one grocery store.
There's also some historical reasons why Native Americans often have higher rates of Type 2 diabetes. Traditionally, there was a hunter-gatherer lifestyle with meats, vegetables, a lot of access to whole foods. When the Indian Removal Act was implemented in 1830 and when tribes often lost a lot of access to those traditional foods and their ability to hunt and gather, (they) had to rely more heavily on rations like flour and lard and sugar.
You know, McCoy pointed out in his interview that a lot of people think of things like fry bread as a traditional food, but it's not really. It's something that certainly came from tribal communities, but it was using these foods that they had to subsist on because they didn't have a lot of other options a lot of the time.
Henricksen: Fry bread is one that does come to mind to me. So it's not really a first food; it is an adapted food. It's a survival food.
Sun: Right.
Henricksen: So now that the pilot's finished, how does the future of this program look?
Sun: So this particular program was funded in large part by a grant from the Special Diabetes Program for Indians, which is through Indian Health Services. And that grant money goes until 2027, at which point the clinic will reapply for funding. But I do know that this is a major priority for Nimiipuu Health and for many other tribal clinics as well.
Henricksen: This story is part of InsightsNW. It's NWPB's push to produce more solutions journalism. Can you talk a bit about what solutions journalism is?
Sun: So, solutions journalism looks at larger problems that are happening. What have people already done and tried to fix this? And what's worked and what hasn't worked? And where might some of these principles apply elsewhere?
Henricksen: Rachel, thank you for your time. Thanks for your reporting.
Sun: Thank you, Connor.
Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
