How do Doctors test for Hypoglycemia?
Can I take a test to "prove" that hypoglycemia is the problem?
This corresponds to the Glucose Tolerance Test described earlier, except that it may be even more conclusive because it includes testing for improvement by having you eat or drink at a point in the test where symptoms are severe.
With the availability of home glucose meters (used by diabetics), you may be tempted to run the test yourself. Some sources even recommend that you do so. But I would recommend against it. First, if your problem is severe, an unsupervised test could be dangerous. Taking a large dose of glucose on an empty stomach and then fasting for 5 hours could result in very severe symptoms. Second, in checking through state-of-the-art glucometers, I found that most are not accurate down in the 50 mg/dl range. If you have relative hypoglycemia, this may not matter, but if your blood sugar drops very low, your results won’t be accurate. And the meters are really quite expensive. Third, your doctor will not trust your test results and will require you to take a supervised GTT anyway.
The Hypoglycemia Diet
The best way to approach your suspected hypoglycemia if your doctor is unable to help is to follow a hypoglycemia diet. The hypoglycemia diet, the most important rule of which is "Don't Eat Sugar" is not dangerous in any way, and in fact, is a healthy recipe for living that would work for anyone. If your symptoms improve when you change your diet, that may prove that hypoglycemia is the problem, but more importantly, you will feel better. And once you feel better, an official diagnosis may not be very important.