Insulin Injection Sites
Know Your Proper Insulin Injection Sites
If you are a diabetic, you need to rotate your insulin injection sites so that you don’t develop fat deposits or hard lumps at the site you use most often. The lumps are uncomfortable, and they also change the way the body absorbs insulin, which can make it more difficult to regulate your blood glucose levels.
Diabetic patients are instructed to do the same time of day’s injection in the same general location, and rotate the other shots. If you have selected the abdomen for your morning injections, for example, give *every* morning injection in the abdomen. Don’t do it in the thigh one day, if it’s the dose that normally is injected into your abdomen. Insulin can be absorbed at various rates of speed, depending on where you inject it.
Eli Lilly, who is one of the leaders in insulin manufacturing, has found that insulin enters the blood the slowest if you inject in the buttocks, which are one of the three most common insulin injection sites. The legs are the next slowest injection point, followed by the arms. The insulin enters your bloodstream fastest if you inject yourself in the abdomen.
Unless you have different instructions from your physician, you should inject both breakfast and lunch doses into your abdomen. This is the fastest absorption area, and you will need this at times when you will be ingesting a large amount of carbohydrates.
By comparison, your bedtime or evening dose is a more long-acting dose, and you can inject it into your upper arm, buttocks or thigh. In this manner, the long-acting insulin will work through the night by affecting your glucose level through the night.
If you are mixing fast-acting and slow-acting insulins into one injection, it can be injected into any area. To keep from causing fat deposits and hard lumps, select a different specific area within the general part of the body you are using.
Also, try to change sides within the area you are injecting. If you use the left thigh for one evening injection, use the right the next night. This will cause fewer lumps and deposits. You can picture a clock face on your abdomen, if it helps. Use different positions like hands on a clock to keep each injection site at least a finger away from the injection you did last.
Work together with your physician to carefully track the glucose levels in your blood, when you start rotating your insulin injection sites. After a time, your doctor and you should be able to discern what sites give you the best slow-acting and fast-acting control in the daytime and at night. In this way, you will be able to best control your diabetes.