Do supplements and adaptogens truly work?

[gleem]

A good place to check the efficacy and safety of supplements is https://www.consumerlab.com/

They provide information on common/popular supplements such as the actual amount of active ingredients vs what the manufacturer put on the label and the presence and amount of any harmful contaminants such as heavy metals which is surprisingly in a lot of these natural (healthy?) products.

They report on past and current research and the side effects etc.

Recent Articles include:

Does Vitamin D Reduce Fracture Risk?​

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Who Should Use Red Yeast Rice​

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Cocoa Flavanols & Blood Pressure​

It's sort of a Consumer Report for supplements. The free website gives a summary of its findings for more things than one ever thought of taking.

You can also subscribe to a weekly newsletter and get access to all their studies.

 

[Drakkith]

Are you suggesting some kind of government authority needs to test & certify effectiveness? Why don't we just let the market decide? If you take some cold "remedy" and it doesn't work for you, don't buy it again.

I admit I don't know what a good solution would be. I just know that sifting through products on a shelf to find the one product that isn't a scam says something about the state of the industry and that it needs fixing.

 

[Laroxe]

I do agree that when people are ill they are often ripe for exploitation, and there are always large numbers of people and organisations ready to take advantage of this. I can think of some examples where I think the behaviour of some practitioners, is so disgraceful that they should be imprisoned, but the whole area is such a mess it does seem impossible to solve.

I think the first problem is that medicine is a messy subject, and the quality of biomedical "evidence" simply doesn't lend itself to black and white choices. While most people in medicine support the idea of it being evidence based, surprisingly little can be described as scientifically validated. The discussion around placebo effects highlights the fact that people are not the most predictable of research subjects.

All of the problems mentioned are indeed valid, but it can be an interesting exercise to compare the evidence of harms from both traditional and allopathic approaches to treatments. There are large numbers of drugs available, supported by research, that in reality were only developed to maintain company profits, antidepressants being a prime example. There is also the problem that drug development often involves increasing the potency of the active compounds, and this carries its own risks. Medicine is just as heavily influenced by fashion, fads and moral decision-making as other aspects of our culture, and in fact many of the approaches we describe as alternative are derived from and supported by medics. At the risk of triggering the moderators, I suspect that this is as much an issue of ethics and morality than it is about science and the public understanding of science, lies at its core.

This reviews some of the issues
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4572812/