Doctor’s Orders: Take Your Supplements
Does your doctor take nutritional supplements? The answer may surprise you. The stereotype says that doctors completely disregard nutritional supplements, and instead place their faith in “mainstream medicine.” It turns out that the number of physicians and nurses who take dietary supplements is higher than the number of average Americans who take supplements.
The Council for Responsible Nutrition (CRN), a trade association representing ingredient suppliers and manufacturers in the dietary supplement industry, conducted a survey of health care professionals, “to determine the personal attitudes toward dietary supplements of those people working in healthcare and how this impacts whether or not they recommend supplements to their patients.”
The survey results showed that, contrary to the stereotype, 89 percent of nurses, and 72 percent of physicians take dietary supplements, while only 68 percent of Americans overall take dietary supplements. Of the doctors taking supplements, 85 percent of them recommend supplements to their patients. What the survey also discovered is that even physicians who do not take supplements are comfortable talking about supplements with their patients. Of the 28 percent of physicians who do not take dietary supplements, 62 percent recommend supplements to their patients.
This last bit of news, while extremely positive, is rather surprising. What could be causing so many physicians who do not take supplements to recommend them to their patients? One theory is that the physicians are recommending patients take supplements for specific conditions (such as glucosamine for arthritis, or calcium for osteoporosis), while the doctors themselves do not suffer that condition.
The data from this survey suggests that physicians are following the recommendations from the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), which in 2002 began recommending that everyone, regardless of age or health status, take a daily multivitamin. The American Medical Association’s recommendation was based on comparisons of many long term studies, which showed that vitamin deficiencies are strongly linked to a wide range of illnesses and diseases, such as cancer and coronary heart disease. The JAMA’s researchers concluded at the time that, “It’s rare to find a health-promoter that offers such a substantial benefit with a relatively low cost and low risk of problems, and when you have such a thing, you ought to jump on it.” The most recent research seems to agree that Americans should “jump on it” and take their multivitamins to obtain the vitamins and minerals they are missing by not eating a healthy diet.
- Douaud, Clarisse. “Most Healthcare Professionals Take Supplements, Says CRN Survey.”
NutraIngredients USA. November 15, 2007. http://www.nutraingredients-usa.com
- Vitamin Research Products. “Multivitamins Should be Taken By Everyone, According to AMA.”
http://www.vrp.com/art/824.asp
- “About CRN.” Council for Responsible Nutrition Website. http://www.crnusa.org/
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