If you are old enough to remember the old sitcom "Cheers," you might also remember that in a "Very Special Episode" (which is just 80's parlance for a boring episode involving hugs and learning a lesson in the most obtuse way possible), diabetes was mentioned.
In that episode, the dull-witted character Woody asked something along the lines of, "Isn't insulin the cure for diabetes?" Sadly, in this case the answer to Virginia's question is no, Santa Claus doesn't exist.
Insulin is not a cure for diabetes, in much the same way that lotion is not a cure for dry skin or eczema.
It is merely a tool used in the combating of diabetes.
Let's talk about how insulin works in your system.
Under normal, healthy conditions, the sugar in your blood stream travels around nourishing cells.
Your blood carries around this sugar, and also a level of insulin.
Insulin chemically facilitates the absorption of the sugar in your blood, so that your cells can continue to work effectively.
Unfortunately, in the diabetic's body, this reaction just doesn't work properly.
Since there are different kinds of diabetes, these malfunctions can be a few things, such as not having enough insulin being produced, or not being able to properly use the insulin that is naturally produced.
In fact, in a lot of diabetics, those with Type 2 diabetes, insulin isn't even necessary to be healthy.
In the bodies of Type 2 diabetics who don't need insulin, injecting it would actually do more harm than good.
Just like with everything else in life (with the possible exception of money), it is possible to have too much insulin...
this may actually result in having artificially induced hypoglycemia.
So in those cases, insulin would be more like adding another problem to Type 2 diabetes, rather like taking antibiotics in the face of a viral infection would only result in having naturally occurring bacteria become resistant to that particular antibiotic.
So in this case, insulin isn't even a good idea.
And insulin is never a cure.
In the cases of people who need to occasionally inject insulin in order to keep their blood sugar levels reasonable, insulin is a treatment.
Just like all other treatments, it needs to be continued for as long as the problem persists (in the case of diabetes, certainly in Type 1 diabetes, perhaps for the rest of the person's life).
Because insulin's effects are as temporary as the sugar released into your blood stream after a meal, every individual injection is only a "cure" in the same sense as an emergency inhaler "cures" an individual asthma attack.
Unfortunately, at this point in time, the closest thing to a cure for diabetes is to live a healthy lifestyle.
Ultimately, that's the best you can do.