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6 ways being a sucker for supplements can go wrong

 •  • by Paul Ingraham
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Weekly nuggets of pain science news and insight, usually 100-300 words, with the occasional longer post. The blog is the “director’s commentary” on the core content of PainScience.com: a library of major articles and books about common painful problems and popular treatments. See the blog archives or updates for the whole site.

Not many supplements have dangerous side effects at sane dosages, and so they are often defended by asking, “What’s the harm?” This is a naive cliché of medical credulity. Just because a supplement isn’t directly poisonous doesn’t mean there aren’t very real indirect and/or non-medical threats. And those are:

  1. Wasting time, attention, and money.+And spending money on most supplements is not just wasting it … it’s giving it to assholes. 😱 Straight into the deep pockets of corporate douchebags. Big Suppla is mostly a subsidiary of Big Pharma these days. And most of the exceptions? MLMs! Multi-level marketing scams run by shady creeps raking in the dough at the tops of their pyramid schemes.
  2. The “opportunity cost” of the road not taken.+Good health is at least 95% about “the basics.” Health “optimizations” are not just much less important, they also have a significant opportunity cost: every moment and dollar spent on the not-basics is stolen directly from the much more important basics!
  3. It’s often unsafe to replace or delay real medical care with supplements (or to combine them).
  4. Faith in supplements often leads to overzealous dosing and a much greater risk of side effects.
  5. Believing trivial bullshit leads to believing serious bullshit. (The pandemic demonstrated this vividly.)
  6. An unregulated and massively profitable industry (“Big Suppla”) means there’s a small but real risk of contamination/adulteration.

And of course all of these apply to most others kinds of snake oil.

PainSci Member Login » Submit your email to unlock member content. If you can’t remember/access your registration email, please contact me. ~ Paul Ingraham, PainSci Publisher