A board-certified family physician explains why testing is not a burden but the beginning of healing
About 12% of Americans have diabetes, but most of them do not know it. That is not a statistic Dr. Toussaint Mears-Clarke recites from a distance. It is the reality he navigates every day as a board-certified family physician and Fellowship Program Director at Methodist Hospital of Sacramento. For him, the gap between diagnosis and awareness is not a medical footnote. It is a community crisis with a clear solution.
“This is the type of disease that you will not feel that you actually have,” he told rolling out. “You have almost no symptoms until it might be too late.”
Why so many people avoid testing for diabetes
Dr. Mears-Clarke understands why people resist finding out. The fear of a diagnosis, the disruption it implies, the weight of having to change a life already stretched thin, are all real barriers.
“A lot of people are almost afraid to know that they have something,” he said. “Getting tested feels like an unachievable obstacle for many of us.”
But he reframes the act of testing entirely. Rather than a door to bad news, he sees it as the entry point to something better. “Getting tested is really the start of a beautiful pathway towards healing,” he said. “That’s how you can start to understand how to take care of yourself for the rest of your life.”
The prediabetes window that most people miss
Roughly 115 million Americans have prediabetes, which is approximately one-third of the entire population. Most of them have no idea. Dr. Mears-Clarke calls this the most important window in the entire diabetes conversation.
“My parents told me an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” he said. “If you can catch it early, you can control it. Imagine if you could catch that early, before you had that full diagnosis.”
Early detection makes intervention possible. It also changes the stakes. A prediabetes diagnosis is not the same as a diabetes diagnosis, but it is a clear signal that the body is moving in that direction, and that movement can be slowed or stopped.
What actually works after a prediabetes diagnosis
Dr. Mears-Clarke does not lead with medication. He leads with movement, food and emotional honesty.
“Movement is medicine,” he said. “Walk through the parking lot, do chair exercises, dance with a friend. Whatever you can do to move your body is going to have huge impacts.”
On nutrition, he keeps it straightforward. Eat plants, legumes, whole grains, vegetables and fruit. He points to Michael Pollan’s Food Rules as a guide worth following, summarized simply as eat food, not too much, and mostly plants.
The third pillar is the one that often goes unaddressed in clinical settings. “We have stress, trauma, bills, family issues,” he said. “That emotional side of having a disease needs attention.” He recommends journaling, deep breathing, mindfulness and rest as tools that directly support physical healing.
How community changes the odds
Dr. Mears-Clarke consistently returns to connection as a medical intervention in its own right. He encourages patients to find accountability partners, whether they have diabetes or not, and to see a diagnosis as an opportunity for closeness rather than isolation.
“Having a disease and having something you have to work on actually invites connection,” he said. “1 in 10 of us has diabetes, which means we are going to know somebody impacted by this disease. There’s no real shaming here. It’s really just connection.”
That philosophy extends to how he approaches his own work. He became a physician, he says, because medicine gave him a way to help people while doing what he loves most, talking to them, learning from them and understanding the full shape of a human life.
“Every person I talk to is an opportunity to change an entire community,” he said. “Not just a person.”