Naomi Okonjo-Bell

Background

Naomi spent eight years as an inpatient diabetes educator at a county hospital in Providence, where she met most people on the worst day of their metabolic lives — a first hospitalisation, a foot ulcer, an A1c above eleven — and had roughly eleven minutes with them at discharge. She left in 2017 because the thing that actually helps, which is sustained contact with someone who knows your labs, was structurally impossible inside that job.

Her clinical interest is insulin resistance in the long stretch before it becomes a diagnosis: the decade or more when fasting glucose still reads normal, the pancreas is quietly compensating, and nobody has ordered the one test that would show it. She is unusually insistent about fasting insulin and about the triglyceride-to-HDL ratio, both of which are cheap, both of which are routinely skipped.

She is a Certified Diabetes Care and Education Specialist and sits on the Rhode Island Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics' public policy committee, where she has spent three years arguing — so far unsuccessfully — for medical nutrition therapy to be a covered benefit for prediabetes rather than only for diabetes, which is a bit like funding fire extinguishers only after the house is alight.