Shoot Up or Put Up

Meters, meters everywhere

It’s fast approaching the end of 2009 and every form of media is crammed with lazy, poorly composed “end of the year” reviews. And, of course, your soaraway Shoot Up is no exception.

But forget those boring articles, TV clip shows or back-slapping awards ceremonies you see on the television. Who cares about comedy awards, or Baftas or even the Oscars, when you have Shoot Up’s soaraway Blood Glucose Meter of the Year award? Yes, I’ve poured myself into my dinner suit to write this article live from the glitzy surroundings of our kitchen table! Woo!

2009 has been a controversial year for blood glucose meters (actually, it hasn’t; I’m just trying – without much success – to add a tiny degree of dramatic tension to the proceedings…) with a whole range of new meters coming on the market, some of which I’ve bothered to test.

Anyway, the first that must have a mention (if only a dishonourable one) is of course Menarini’s GlucoMen LX, which was almost universally despised by anyone who’s had the misfortune to use one. Nasty, tacky and cheap, the GlucoMen LX inspired nothing but revolted disdain in this reviewer. Hopefully Menarini will try harder next time and I hope they forgive me for getting my horrible review to be the second result in Google’s search results for their product.

Moving swiftly on, the Accu-Chek Aviva Nano is certainly worthy of mention for its sexy, sleek looks and useful functions. However, it was badly let down by Accu-Chek’s crappy looking test strip that just makes the whole lot look ugly. Don’t get me wrong – it’s a perfectly good test strip – but it needs a serious redesign to sex it up.

But, in my view, this year’s winner is the pretty wonderful Abbott Freestyle Lite. It looks pretty sexy, has some of the best test strips on the market and two great features. The first is the ability to add more blood to a sample if you don’t squeeze out enough first time around, which saves wasting a strip. And also stops the utter, utter misery having to repeat a test after you’ve spent 5 minutes trying to get blood out of freezing cold fingers. The second worthy feature is a little LED that lights up the test strip when you’re testing in the dark. A simple addition – but one that’s bloody marvellous.

So there we have it – congratulations to Abbott and their joyful Freestyle Lite. Here’s to 2010 – cheers!

You can see all our blood glucose meter reviews here.

Related posts:

1. The perfect blood glucose meter
2. Review – LifeScan OneTouch Ultra2
3. Getting blood out of a finger
4. A bazillion diabetics test their blood glucose
5. Review – Abbott Freestyle Lite