Dietary Supplements Pose Real Dangers to Patients
One article on PainSci cites White 2020: Vitamins, Minerals & Supplements for Pain & Healing
original abstract †Abstracts here may not perfectly match originals, for a variety of technical and practical reasons. Some abstacts are truncated for my purposes here, if they are particularly long-winded and unhelpful. I occasionally add clarifying notes. And I make some minor corrections.
The Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act led to a flood of poor-quality dietary supplements. The Food and Drug Administration's (FDA's) jurisdiction is limited to removing products proven unsafe, rather than prospectively assessing them for quality manufacturing. With so many products available, there is very little FDA oversight until reports of patient harm occur. Microbial and heavy metal contamination, adulteration with synthetic drugs (including drugs banned from the United States), substituting herbs, and fraudulently specifying ingredients on the label have all occurred. Clinicians should collectively advocate for legislative change, only recommend products tested by outside laboratories for quality, and educate consumers about the risks of using unverified products.
This page is part of the PainScience BIBLIOGRAPHY, which contains plain language summaries of thousands of scientific papers & others sources. It’s like a highly specialized blog. A few highlights:
- Photobiomodulation therapy is not better than placebo in patients with chronic nonspecific low back pain: a randomised placebo-controlled trial. Guimarães 2021 Pain.
- No effect of creatine monohydrate supplementation on inflammatory and cartilage degradation biomarkers in individuals with knee osteoarthritis. Cornish 2018 Nutr Res.
- The CANBACK trial: a randomised, controlled clinical trial of oral cannabidiol for people presenting to the emergency department with acute low back pain. Bebee 2021 Med J Aust.
- Relationships Between Sleep Quality and Pain-Related Factors for People with Chronic Low Back Pain: Tests of Reciprocal and Time of Day Effects. Gerhart 2017 Ann Behav Med.
- Modulation in the elastic properties of gastrocnemius muscle heads in individuals with plantar fasciitis and its relationship with pain. Zhou 2020 Sci Rep.