219 Diabetes Spectrum Volume 17, Number 4, 2004 From Research to Practice / Diabetes and Men’s Health Issues The management and impact of type 2 diabetes on the sense of self, lifestyle, and significant others of African-American men is not well understood. This article reports on a study to examine perceptions of managing and coping with diabetes among African-American men and summarizes its findings regarding the distribution of clinical biomarkers, participants’ perceptions of the cause of their diabetes, its impact on masculinity, use of home remedies for diabetes care, and the degree to which effective coping skills and social support are engaged and available. In Brief Views From Within and Beyond: Illness Narratives of African-American Men With Type 2 Diabetes Leandris C. Liburd, MPH, MA; Apophia Namageyo-Funa, MPH; Leonard Jack, Jr., PhD, MSc; and Edward Gregg, PhD How African-American men manage type 2 diabetes and the impact of this disease on their sense of self, lifestyle, and significant others is not well understood. Despite the dispropor- tionate burden of diabetes and its associated complications among African-American men, rarely has published research—clinical or ethno- graphic—been devoted specifically to diabetes in this population. Why is it important to understand a patient’s perspective of the psy- chosocial, cultural, and behavioral aspects of living with diabetes? While health care providers are often princi- pally concerned with disease manage- ment, patients may contemplate their disease more broadly within an illness framework. 1 Disease management tends to be limited to efforts to correct “abnormalities in the structure and/or function of organs and organ systems; pathological states whether or not they are culturally recognized.” 2 Illness, on the other hand, is described as “how the sick person and the mem- bers of the family or wider social net- work perceive, live with, and respond to symptoms and disability.” 3 How illness is perceived is culturally con- structed and has meaning, and these meanings have implications for suc- cessful diabetes management. In this study, we present the dis- tribution of clinical biomarkers (e.g., hemoglobin A 1c [A1C], LDL choles- terol, and total cholesterol) of dia- betes in African-American men as part of Project DIRECT (Diabetes Interventions Reaching and Educat- ing Communities Together), a multi- year community diabetes demonstra- tion project supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). 4 The principal purpose of this article, however, is to offer a cultural analysis of the expe- riences of African-American men who live with diabetes.