FSL: My Experience

When it comes to diabetes tech, the scene is ruled by two major pharmaceutic industries: Medtronic and Abbott. Talking about the latter, its fame is surely connected with its most famous product: Freestyle Libre. This FGM has truly revolutionized its field, providing an entirely new way of controlling blood glucose, simply through a painless and easy scan. Being an Freestyle aficionado since 2018, through the last five years I've had the occasion to experiment the pros and cons of this device, which, developing year after year, is now at its third model: the Freestyle Libre 3, a true CGM! However, having used only Libre 1 and 2, my review will be focused on these two last ones. 

Let's start with the many positive features of Libre. First and foremost, in my opinion, Abbot's masterpiece when it comes to this product is its extreme simplicity: for what concerns my experience, such an intuitive and easy-to-install device is impossible to finde elsewhere on the market. The simple graphics of the app, the rapidity of the scan and the customiseable menu are the features which do the trick. Furthermore, Abbott's customer care is truly satisfying: through some recent rearrangement in their organisation, their help to the client has become even more fast and effective. But now, you may be asking yourself why would you ever need to contact them. 

Well, unfortunately, not all that glitters is gold. Especially in the last years, I've often found myself facing rather inaccurate Libre sensors: namely, a frequent pattern which I've observed is that the device is, for some reason, likely to overestimate BG values in the first days of the sensor lifetime, aligning with glucometer-checked glycaemia only for a few days and then ending up largely underestimating them in the last days of functioning. While some minor inaccuracies have to be expected in the last and first day of lifespan of the sensor, this has not been the case for me: not rarely, the gap has been so wide and prolonged that a sensor substitution was the only thing I could opt for. Luckily, Abbott is always ready to replace the inaccurate sensor with a new one. Furthermore, one major thing about both Libre 1 and 2 was that they were, indeed, FGMs: I came at a point in my diabetes management history when I decided that I wanted more, and with more I mean a CGM. Luckily, Libre 3 has solved this last issue and seems to be even a lot more accurate than its predecessors. 

However, since giving up has never been an option for me, and since when I first faced these problems FSL 3 hadn't been released yet, I found a way to bypass these issues, also introducing the incredibly useful tool of calibration: xDrip+. And calibration is the exact reason why I'm still sticking to this app up to nowadays, when Libre 3 is on the market. Always remember that, coming from third party developers, xDrip+ is not recognized neither approved by Abbott.

Thank you for having read my article: more are bound to come on this and other aspects about diabetes technologies. All you have to do is to stay tuned on The Diabetes Solution and never forget to keep reading this and other sections of my website!