^They got the type right (again, type 2 doesn't require immediate medication except for in extremely rare circumstances, and even then the character's physique would have made him being a type 2 diabetic with DKA even more unlikely), they got the scenario wrong. The thing that irks me is that they could have easily gotten it right and still had the exact same dilemma: Type 1 diabetic needs medication within hours to prevent death. but they got it backwards -- in the movie they say he needs insulin. You need insulin when your blood sugar is high. It'd take at least a week for high blood sugar to kill him. Probably more like a few weeks. He would feel pretty crummy, but he'd actually be able to function pretty normally for several days at least. If his blood sugar was dropping, on the other hand, the risk of death would be imminent, just like they needed it to be in the movie. All they'd have to do is switch out what medication he needed: instead of insulin he would need glucagon. The movie Panic Room used this as the driving force of the plot.
And, after writing all that, believe me, I get that it's just a movie, and a ridiculous one at that. However, getting the medicine right wouldn't have had any effect on the drama at all, so there was no reason not to have done at least a tad of very easy research. Further, it's been demonstrated in multiple studies that people remember medical information from films and TV as fact; they remember the medical information but forget the source of that information. This means that when confronted with a medical emergency, people will recall bad information ("Oh no! Petra is having a seizure, I remember from somewhere that you're supposed to put something in her mouth to keep her from biting her tongue!"), but since they've forgotten the source, they won't filter it through the lens of ("Oh, but that was in a shit movie, so it's probably wrong!").
Does this mean that film and TV writers have an obligation to get medical information right? I don't know, but in a case like this, where getting it right would have been ridiculously easy and not effected the plot or level of drama, not doing so is just annoying!
