In this country, we’ve got pills for everything – pills for your heart, pills for your stomach, pills to raise you up and pills to bring you down. Every year, far too many patients walk away from doctors with another pill that they are told will solve their most recent problem. This is a frequent criticism of the mainstream medical profession, but I think we sometimes commit this very crime ourselves.

Given the power and versatility found in the use of vitamins, supplements and herbal extracts, it is easy to see how a pill or combination of pills may be used to improve a patient’s state of health. This doesn’t bother me in acute scenarios, but when patients are given a prescription for a lifetime of these capsules or tablets I feel some measure of concern creep into my mind. Although we may assuage ourselves with the claim that our interventions are ‘natural’, is it really all that different from giving a pharmaceutical? Do our patients really need to take multiple pills every day to attain a natural state of health? I am, of course, equally guilty of this transgression – as a colleague of mine recently stated, during exams we students are held together by little more than vitamins, fish oil and adaptogens which add up to a lot of pills per day. When exams are done however, I like to take a period where I put away the capsules and regain my health through proper diet and exercise. I suppose that’s really how I’d like to see supplements used – as a short term intervention. It may be idealistic but for now I prefer to hope that, when possible, I will utilize supplements as a tool of transition. One I employ to help my patients move towards a healthier lifestyle, instead of being used as a crutch for the rest of their lives. There will of course be those cases where patients are unable, or unwilling to change. In such frequent scenarios I expect supplements to be one of my first-line interventions, but if I can minimize the number of pills and capsules my patients are on permanently, then I’ll sleep a bit better at night.
 
Perhaps my approach to this issue is a bit idealistic, but I’ll be putting it to the test soon as I begin to see patients as a primary intern. I look forward to utilizing supplements and vitamins to help patients get better, but with the hope that in the end they will walk away from me not with pills, but with a more natural, healthy lifestyle.