From some viewpoints, supplements can be a controversial subject. Are they really worth taking? Or are they an expensive placebo?
Scores of supplements have undergone trials and research, with both positive and negative conclusions. However, it’s something that is very hard to truly test, when there are so many variables to health and lifestyle. It’s clear that if you have a measured deficiency, that supplementing with the targeted vitamin would help level out that deficiency.
Many herbal supplements can also be highly effective, herbs being the basis for much of medicine, they clearly have medicinal qualities, but it’s still hard to measure their effect.
Supplements also work synergistically, so sometimes it can be unfair to isolate them and evaluate them just on that basis. The common advise is to try one supplement at a time, so you can tell what makes the difference, but what if the difference is only noticeable when you combine 2 or 3 together.
Multivitamins on the other hand, seem like a heavy handed approach to vitamin deficiency, they only provide a small increase on daily amounts, without really targeting a deficiency properly. They mostly feel like a band-aid for a poor diet, and not even a very effective band-aid.
Having a supplement strategy therefore is very important for chronic illness. Everyone with chronic illness is probably more aware than normal people in regards supplements. We read articles and research supplements that might help us, which gives us hope. We fork out the money to try them, but nothing changes, or maybe we only get a tiny improvement that doesn’t seem to warrant paying a lot money for.
Affordable and effective supplements are therefore the best to focus on. Obviously you need to make sure the quality is good, and often we mistake price for quality, many supplements market themselves as upmarket whilst being the same quality of cheaper brands. It’s a hard industry to navigate, because it’s very unregulated. It’s essentially medicine that isn’t treated as medicine regulation wise, you can buy them from online stores, and get very strong effects on mood, sleep or bodily functions.
I use a magnesium spray for sleep in the evening, and it might as well be called dreams in a bottle, because I get extremely vivid dreams from using it. Whether this spray continues to be useful is another matter, it does in some ways improve sleep, but in other ways, sleep becomes less relaxing, because you are anticipating these vivid dreams.
No health therapy is without a downside, supplements included, it’s very often a case of the positives outweighing the negatives. Even though I wish to improve my health, I’d generally prefer milder effects over strong changes, considering the long term.
I think if you find a supplement, and it improves your health by 1% ( which I know is hard to measure ), then if you find 10 similar supplements, you are getting a 10% improvement. A 10% improvement in health is the difference in gaining a foothold with your symptoms verses continuing to decline. I think it’s very important to reach this goal, of finding at least 10 supplements or foods to include in your diet, that make you feel even a tiny bit better. All these positive effects add up eventually, and it can really make a difference.
One strategy could be to look to include 2 new supplements each month that work well together. Review how you feel every month or two, and after 3 months decide whether that supplement is effective or not. There are many ways to strategize supplements, you can take it slow, taking one at a time, or take 10 at once, and see if it makes a big change, later dropping them one at a time, to see if anything changes. Keeping a diary, and rating your health can be helpful to recognise patterns, as if you just consider it with thoughts, you can lose track of effectiveness.
Overall I think supplements are a net positive to chronic illness, and are certainly effective in some cases, I think a lot can also be placebo but in the end, I think even expensive placebo is worth it.
I’ve always had doubts on supplements, only recently I started to rethink if they might really help.