Be careful with your supplements (A Warning from a Doctor)

#1

My apologies but going to get on soapbox for a moment. As an ER doctor I tend to notice when people are doing foolish and or dangerous things. That applies to this forum. My being a physician does not make me smarter or more knowledgeable than anyone else here, but I have a lot of experience. Things I’d recommend to people here.

Do not assume a supplement is “safe”.

Supplements are not “natural” in the doses they come in. Consider them “drugs”.

Supplements interact with other supplements and medications.

Supplements can be toxic at higher doses.

Do not assume anyone on this forum knows what they are talking about. Some people are clearly on the wrong part of the Dunning Kruger curve.

A supplement may affect you differently than others based on other supplements and meds you take, health issues you have, your diet and your metabolism.

The benefit to risk ratio is not overwhelming. You probably will get a minor benefit from supplements, so when in doubt, stop taking them until you feel they are safe.

Exercise, a healthy diet, normal body weight, good sleep, and stress reduction are far superior to any supplements.

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#2

I’ve had more side effects with certain supplements than with most medications.

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#3

Do you want to rate my stack?
Where do we find someone that can do this?
I don’t think there really is anyone that can do that properly.

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#4

On that note, @KarlT I’d love to know which things you feel good about taking and which things you’ve seen in the ER causing problems.

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#5

Use one of the major Ais (Claude, Gemini, or ChatGPT) to help you do the analysis. I recently did this with my supplement stack and we identified several severe risks that were previously unknown to me. This cause my to eliminate some supplements and adjust my dosage and protocol for others.

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#6

I did the same and it was very helpful.

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#7

oh yea I’ve pitted the AIs against each other and have run many iterations of my protocol, yet still, some things it agrees with and then I have to find the problems with it… which suggests there are inherent problems with that approach.

But it is definitely helpful. I suppose after a while, we become the experts.

#8

It would be helpful to give examples. Obviously, that wouldn’t be all inclusive but eventually crowd sourcing has a value.

I’ll give mine. A patient misheard or misread instructions and took 50,000 IUs if vitamin D daily. He showed up in an ER and got admitted for hypercalcemia. It was at least a few days in the hospital.

I don’t know what symptoms he had but hypercalcemia is moans, bones, stones and abdominal groans (by memory - don’t quote me). Kidney stones, abdominal pain (inc acid), bone pain and you can have mental status changes.

It can cause death from cardiac instability but that doesn’t count as a symptom.

I had a married couple both get ulcers from some tumeric. It was a very pure powder their naturopath gave them. One bled and one perforated in the first 2 months on it. They both had gastric bypasses which have a high risk of ulcers. I imagine the dose was very high but they never brought it to me.

Those are my 2 personal examples. An ER doc should definitely have more.

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