It’s now been 6 months since my son switched from Medtronic Guardian 4 continuous glucose monitors (CGMs) to Abbott’s Instinct CGMs. This has been life changing for our family. In the good way.

The primary purpose of a CGM in my son’s therapy is to prevent overnight lows. It’s been years, but he twice had seizures due to extreme lows that he did not sense. (Likely just too sleepy after a rough day of being twenty-something.) He now lives alone 20 minutes away, but none of us feel it’s appropriate for him to sleep alone without a working CGM.

Guardian CGMs are good for one week at a time. This meant that each weekend my son would come home one night and start a new one. The odds were about one-in-five that any given one would be bloody or otherwise wouldn’t start up and offer usably-accurate numbers. Every few weeks I would sleep at his place Sunday night while we waited for a second CGM to settle down and offer good numbers.

The Abbott Instinct CGMs seem to “install” more predictably, dropping that one-in-five failure rate to more like one-in-eight. They do, indeed run for two weeks, so we have a weekend “off,” not having to worry about a new CGM starting or not. Between the higher success rate and the longer life, our stress level has plummeted.

Are they perfect? No. Abbott CGM’s really can’t be calibrated – biasing subsequent readings based on finger stick results. Abbott famously suffered a lawsuit for similar sensors that chronically read low. A given Instinct sensor may read nearly 15 points low for most of its life (in our experience) making it unsuitable, we feel, to put the pump into “auto” mode during the day, but it’s more than accurate-enough to allow the pump to suspend delivery overnight to avoid lows.

We’re thankful that technology marches on and that Medtronic has accepted that they may not be the best at everything. In addition to making their latest pumps compatible with the Instinct, they’re still compatible with Guardian 4’s and there’s another 6 day sensor called Simplera.

Instincts are expensive at Medtronic and they have a mixed record at getting insurance to accept these “hardware” based expenses. Thankfully, Express Scripts now has them in stock and they do a better job at working the insurance side.

Good luck if you go that route! Get in touch if you have questions!