I have been talking to people with diabetes for over thirty years. Most of them are very smart and ask detailed and thoughtful questions. They deserve throughtful answers that give as much detail as they need to understand it properly. Medical terminology can sound complicated and hard to understand. Lots of words are really long and hard to pronounce. It is difficult to know what they mean unless you have a Latin dictionary! But it is usually easy to say the same thing in plain language. I have tried to do this as much as I can in The Diabetes Answer Book. Some of my colleagues are experts at talking and writing in "plain language." I have asked them to look over my answers to help me say things in a way that is easy to understand. That does not mean that I will make an answer simpler than it really is. But I will try to use language that is easy to understand. If you still find my answers to be too confusing or complicated or unclear I invite you to write to me and I will try to explain them better.
Medical textbooks are often written in un-plain language! It you looked up the cause of type 2 diabetes you might see a sentence like this:
"Type 2 diabetes occurs due to genetically determined amyloid deposition in the pancratic islet cells resulting in progressive detrioration in their capacity for insulin secretion."
If you understood that, well done! But if you didn't understand it it does not mean you are dumb. It is possible to say the same thing in language that most people could understand:
"Insulin is a substance made in your pancreas in special cells called islet cells. When you inherit the genes for type 2 diabetes from your parents these islet cells begin to fill up with strange stuff called amyloid. Over years more and more amyloid clogs up the inside of your islet cells so that they make less and less insulin."
Putting it like that is not dumbing down the meaning, just making it easier to understand. I hope that this approach makes the answers more useful to you.