Key takeaways
- Most healthcare practitioners, professional organizations, and lancet device manufacturers recommend changing lancets after each use.
- The reality is that many people with diabetes reuse lancets to save money, reduce waste, or for other reasons.
- There are steps you can take to make reusing lancets safer, including following proper hygiene practices.
Though lancets are typically meant to be single-use items, people with diabetes often reuse them.
There are steps you can take to keep yourself safe and avoid fingertip pain that can accompany fingerstick testing.
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Lancets are delicate, and every time you use them, they lose some of their sharpness. This means that you may have to use more force with each successive use to break your skin, which can be painful and raises the risk of injury.
The reality, however, is that many people with diabetes reuse their lancets.
The reasons for this may vary between individuals. Some people may want to save money, since diabetes management can be expensive and require many tools, and other people may do it for convenience or to reduce waste.
Dr. Karen Cullen, a registered dietitian and diabetes care and education specialist (DCES) at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, says there really isn’t any evidence that reusing lancets on a daily basis causes any higher level of infection of any kind. But reusing dull lancets can lead to scars and callused fingers that make it more difficult to test.
“As long as fingers are clean when poking, changing the lancet is really more about comfort,” says Jane Dickinson, a DCES and director of the Master of Science Program in Diabetes Education and Management at Teachers College of Columbia University in New York. She also lives with type 1 diabetes herself. “A lancet will get duller with each use and, after a while, it hurts and isn’t as effective at drawing blood.”
Lowering infection risk
Ultimately, there are two major factors in lowering the risk of infection:
- Proper hygiene practices: It’s important to thoroughly wash your hands with soap and water before checking your blood sugar with a lancet device.
- Never sharing lancets: As with any needle, it’s imperative to never share lancets with another person.
Dickinson says that having a rotating finger-site routine is something that helped her personally over the years.
The principles of fingerstick site rotation are:
- Poke the sides of the fingertip pads for best results — not all the way to the bone, but on the fleshy part. Focus on where there’s a “dimple” to help reduce any pain from the finger poke.
- Rotate fingertips and spots on every test, to also help decrease pain and reduce scarring:
- Start with the pinky on one hand and poke the outside.
- Next time, use the inside of that same finger.
- Then, move to the outside of the ring finger.
- Next time, poke the inside of the ring finger.
- Continue rotating between fingers and spots on the sides of the fingertips.
Dickinson says she avoids the outside of either pointer (index) finger and also does not poke her thumbs. She goes through one hand and then moves to the other, so each finger has a few days to recover before starting over.
“I poked many times a day for decades and never had scars or calluses,” she says. “I believe having a rotating habit really saved my fingertips! Now I use CGM [continuous glucose monitoring] with no calibrating, so it’s a little harder to remember which finger I’m on when I do a fingerstick blood glucose check.”
Diabetes medical experts, including Dickinson, also recommend healing hand creams made with Aloe vera or vitamin E, especially for those who live in drier climates. Sometimes those products can help keep “holes” from getting raised and rough, they say.
Both Aloe vera and vitamin E have shown some potential in helping wounds heal in people with diabetes.
Here are some other steps to take to keep yourself safe:
- Replace the lancet device cover or cap after use: To do this safely, place the device and cap on a flat surface and carefully slide the cap over the device without letting the lancet needle touch either the flat surface or your fingers. To avoid accidentally sticking yourself, don’t hold the lancet device straight up.
- Avoid cleaning the lancet with alcohol: This will remove the silicone covering on the needle and cause it to become dull.
It’s generally recommended to change lancets after each use. However, reusing lancets is a common practice among people with diabetes for a few reasons, including saving money and reducing waste.
It’s essential to keep your hands clean while checking your blood sugar and never share lancets with anyone else. You can also avoid fingertip pain by rotating fingerstick sites and sticking the sides of your fingertip pads instead of the center.