Does he know the difference between type 1 and type 2 diabetes?

Mr. Brainworm might actually be that stupid. Rich and powerful have genuinely wacky ideas on health. Remember Steve Jobs killed himself by not seeking oncological help for his cancer.

"don't take medical advice from me" seems like legal ass-covering for just that.

"Steve Jobs did it, so it clearly was the right thing to d-what do you mean the cancer killed him"

The failures of capitalism not being recognized as the faults of capitalism so people try to rationalize the world around them without the help of material analysis and also Oprah.

Medicine is privatized and thus too expensive for many people, so they cope with hokum.

I have no idea how this happens to rich people who can actually afford to go to the doctor.

Edit: Sorry for the poorly written wall of text. I just started typing without thinking and before I knew it there was a novella. But tldr: having type 1 diabetes is a big deal and requires constant vigilance or you die.

Yes, you came away with an accurate picture of type 1 diabetes, good summary. I lived with a type 1 diabetic for a while and it was a constant battle to keep her levels in a safe range. On the one hand, taking it was second nature for her, but it became so automatic that she would often forget how many units she took. Did she take too much? Then she was about to "have a low" where she would get extremely woozy, tired, sweaty, and unable to think (literally, it became very hard for her to reason or remember what was going on when the low was bad, compounding the issue) and if it wasn't taken care of, she would lose consciousness at which point we would have to call an ambulance. Fortunately, to stop this if it was caught in time, required drinking tons of orange juice and eating diabetic glucose tablets. But that would cause her blood sugar to spike, leading to her "having a high" (not the fun kind) which made her extremely sick, wired, anxious (understandably) and as you read, seriously harming multiple organs and systems. Part of living with her carried the responsibility of learning how to inject an emergency drug when she passed out from a low in an emergency situation as well as the insulin if she became too incapacitated from a high. (And to be clear, that's high levels of blood sugar, absolutely not a "high" in the traditional sense). To her own admission, she was very forgetful too. There were many times that anything happening had to be canceled because she forgot her insulin. This was never an issue to me, I always tried to be totally understanding, but it really upset her because she always felt like she screwed things up for everyone around her and also scared herself because her forgetfulness could so easily lead to a life-threatening situation. Whenever going literally anywhere, the first question was always "did you remember your insulin and glucose?" And yet still sometimes we would run into situations where it was "oh shit, I actually don't have my insulin."

Essentially, she had to be her own pancreas, ceaselessly keep track of her levels and take in glucose or insulin depending on where they were. And she had the help of modern technology, with small implants she would inject under her skin (that would have to be replaced every couple days and were also expensive on top of the expensive insulin) which when working ideally, would monitor her blood sugar level and transmit that information to a dedicated device she wore at all times, later her smartphone. But it often wouldn't work right for all sorts of reasons, from just plain getting her levels wrong and misreporting, to defective temporary implants not sending a signal, to only working within a certain range - too high and it couldn't accurately read the levels anymore. So she also had to constantly do it the old fashioned way by poking herself, usually her hand, and testing the blood directly, sometimes getting different results from that method vs her "dexcom" unit and having to split the difference, hoping that both weren't wrong, which was literally life-threatening.

It was an ever-present condition. Every meal she ate had to be taken into account not just how many carbs (glucose, essentially) it had, but how fast those carbs get metabolized, and of course when she ate it relative to when she last took her insulin or would next be able to take her insulin dose. It becomes expected background after a while, but it can never be actually forgotten or she would die. An analogy is that she is on a rollercoaster she can never get off of, at any given point in time she is either going high with her levels or dropping low. Both are inevitable, but the goal is to try to always keep them from the extremes, never too high, never too low, injecting insulin and consuming glucose, respectively, as those highs and lows occur. But they are inevitable. And going too far with one inevitably means she'll go too far in the other direction to correct it, yo-yo'ing until something similar to a balance is found again.

And as u/fox said. before insulin was able to first be isolated from pigs, and is now synthetically produced, you were not long for this world if you were type 1 diabetic. It was a 100% mortality rate. My friend was a rare case too, in that more often, type 1 diabetics have it from childhood. She developed it in her 30's from being otherwise totally healthy and she doesn't know why. I could keep writing a whole other wall of text about how much this cost her, at times thousands of dollars a month, paying for insulin so as not to die and how it's functionally no different than holding a gun to her head and saying "pay us or we pull the trigger." Or the sheer incompetence of the industry she relies on for all of this, with people who she's trying to get to understand that her monitoring equipment is failing an needs to be immediately fixed or replaced. Like imagine the last time you dealt with customer service for some tech device and the shit they put you through, now imagine that your life literally depending on finding a solution fast. And the constant fear of who knows what kind of shit going down, due to new laws she has no say in or supply chain collapase, or simply running out of money, such that she won't be able to get more insulin and will, simply, die.

She is also an excellent cook, like one of the best I've ever known. Her whole family are like hardcore culinary enthusiasts, she has walls of bookshelves with cookbooks (she had to sell over 2000 cookbooks she had for space and money). Ethical vegetarian too, but still does the dairy thing so not vegan.

But sure. All she needs to do is take some cooking classes and no more diabetes. She'll be fucking thrilled.