Why Doctors Don’t Know Much About Supplements — And Why It Confuses Patients

By Dr. Ro Mahajan, MD

As a physician who treats patients with regenerative medicine, I often meet people who are interested in supplements to help improve their health or treat specific ailments.

Many patients are naturally drawn toward supplements because they are perceived as more “natural” or food-based solutions. Patients often want something they feel won’t be addictive and, hopefully, won’t carry as many side effects as some prescription medications.

There is also a psychological component to this.

Taking a prescription medication can feel very different than taking a supplement. Prescription medications are often viewed as something you may need indefinitely, while supplements feel more temporary and supportive — something meant to help the body heal or function better naturally.

In short, many patients are looking for natural solutions rather than chemical solutions.

But this is where things can become confusing.

Having attended a U.S. medical school and completed conventional medical training, I can honestly say that the average physician graduates with little education in nutrition.

Taking it a step further, there is often very little — if any — formal education surrounding supplements.

As a result, many conventional physicians are skeptical or even dismissive of supplements — or any “nonconventional” treatments that fall outside the prescription medication model.

But it is important for patients to understand why this happens.

There are really two sides to the story.

Doctors Are Trained to Follow Evidence

Physicians are trained to rely heavily on the medical evidence supporting a treatment.

In medicine, treatments are ideally supported by large clinical trials designed to determine two major things:

1. Is the treatment effective?

   
   

2. Is the treatment safe?

The strongest form of evidence usually comes from large randomized controlled trials involving hundreds or thousands of patients. These studies attempt to determine whether a drug or treatment truly works beyond chance alone. They also document any potential side effects and complications.

This evidence-based approach is deeply ingrained in medical training, and for good reason.

Medicine has a long history of treatments that sounded promising but proved ineffective or even harmful when properly studied.

The problem is that these large studies are extremely expensive.

In many cases, they cost millions (sometimes hundreds of millions) of dollars to complete.

So, who funds them?

In most cases, it’s pharmaceutical drug companies.

These companies have both the financial resources and the financial motivation to fund these studies. Successful trials may eventually lead to FDA approval and widespread use of their medication. In many cases, the potential return on investment alone is worth the expense.

Supplements, on the other hand, usually do not have the same financial backing.

Plus, many supplements are naturally occurring compounds (like vitamin C or magnesium) that cannot be patented in the same way as a pharmaceutical drug.

This means there is often far less financial incentive to spend enormous amounts of money proving their effectiveness through large-scale clinical trials.

So, the end result looks something like this:

• Doctors are trained to trust evidence

  
  

• Most of the best available evidence is for prescription drugs

  
  

• Therefore, most physicians become far more comfortable recommending prescription medications than supplements

But it’s not just the expense and logistics of conducting clinical studies. There’s another factor that must be considered.

Another Major Issue: Regulation

Another reason many physicians hesitate to recommend supplements is that supplements are regulated very differently from prescription medications.

Prescription drugs go through an extremely rigorous approval process before reaching the market. Manufacturers must demonstrate consistency, safety, dosing accuracy, and effectiveness.

Supplements operate under a different regulatory framework.

To be clear, this does not automatically mean supplements are bad or dangerous. Many are indeed both safe and helpful.

But it does mean there can be greater variability in quality, purity, dosing accuracy, and even potential contamination between products and manufacturers.

For instance, in some cases, supplements may not contain exactly what the label claims. Others may interact with certain medications or carry potential risks that patients are unaware of.

Physicians know this, and many become extra cautious because they do not want to recommend something harmful or unreliable unintentionally.

And there is another layer to this conversation that doctors rarely discuss openly.

Doctors Also Fear Becoming "Charlatans"

Most physicians genuinely want to help their patients. As such, they do not want to sell false hope.

Doctors spend years training in an environment where they are taught to avoid treatments lacking strong evidence. Recommending something that later proves ineffective or even dangerous can feel professionally irresponsible.

Many physicians fear being viewed as a charlatan — someone promoting treatments unlikely to help patients.

This fear is amplified because some companies in the supplement industry sometimes make exaggerated marketing claims that are not scientifically supported.

When physicians see supplements marketed as miracle cures for virtually everything imaginable, many instinctively become more skeptical of the entire category.

They are hesitant at best to recommend supplements, especially if there is an approved prescription drug for a health concern a patient is facing.

Reality Is More Nuanced

As with most complex issues, the reality is more nuanced than most people — including doctors — realize.

None of this means supplements are useless.

And it does not mean prescription medications are inherently bad.

Many supplements have legitimate health benefits. Some have strong evidence behind them.

Yet others likely do very little. And some may genuinely cause harm to certain patients in certain situations.

The challenge is that the quality of evidence often varies tremendously from one supplement to another.

At the same time, informed patients are often correct that lifestyle, nutrition, sleep, exercise, stress, metabolic health, and inflammation all play major roles in the bigger picture of their health.

This is partly why many patients often feel frustrated when their doctor only offers medications as solutions while their broader health concerns feel ignored.

In my personal experience, I’ve had many scenarios where my go-to treatment for a patient is a supplement instead of a prescription medication.

For instance, in many cases, a patient is not interested in taking a long-term prescription medication for nerve pain.

I have found that B-vitamins and alpha-lipoic acid can help mitigate nerve pain, even when a patient’s vitamin levels are within the normal range.

In this case, patients are typically eager to reach for supplements rather than prescription medication because there tend to be significantly fewer or less pronounced side effects.

Another example is with sleep aids.

As we age, and especially if we have pain-related issues, we often struggle to get restful sleep. Sometimes it’s an issue of not being able to turn your brain off. Sometimes it’s an issue of not being able to sleep through the night.

I often recommend magnesium glycinate in this scenario. Patients love that it can be used as needed, is not habit-forming, and doesn’t make them groggy.

Finally, my third common go-to is collagen. I recommend this to patients with soft-tissue injuries whom we are treating with a regenerative medicine strategy.

For many patients, it’s easy to understand that they may not be consuming the proper nutrients — or enough of them — to support an optimal healing environment in the body. They see collagen supplementation as a means to help optimize their body’s natural healing processes.

I always recommend Collagen Synthesis™ because it uses science-backed bioactive collagen peptides that help support tendons, ligaments, and cartilage — not just hair, skin, and nails like most of the generic collagen products you see in stores.

Putting It All Together

When it comes to optimizing health, both supplements and prescription drugs have their place. The problem is that, just as with many things these days, nuance gets lost in the weeds.

It is often easier for people — doctors and patients alike — to pick a team and dig their heels in.

I believe patients should approach both supplements and prescription medications with healthy curiosity and skepticism.

“Natural” does not automatically mean safe or effective.

And “prescription” does not automatically mean bad.

The goal should not be blind trust in either side.

The goal should be thoughtful decision-making based on evidence, safety, individual health factors, and realistic expectations.

Good medicine — and good doctors — should leave room for both scientific rigor and open-mindedness.

Ideally, physicians and patients should be able to have honest conversations about supplements without immediately dismissing one another.

So, what’s the best way to safely and effectively incorporate supplements into optimizing health?

One of the best ways is to choose supplements only from reputable companies committed to third-party testing and to following good manufacturing practices (GMP).

If a supplement is not third-party tested for purity or is not produced in a GMP-certified facility, then you should avoid it.

Most reputable supplement companies, including SaltWrap, go out of their way to ensure this information is explicitly stated on their product labels.

For instance, every SaltWrap formula is third-party tested and produced in GMP-certified facilities in the U.S.

This alone helps ensure a level of quality and safety that many supplement companies neglect for the sake of maximizing their margins.

Plus, SaltWrap recently partnered with Light Labs, an industry-leading testing lab that is committed to what it calls “radical transparency” in supplement labeling.

It means that every SaltWrap product is tested for label accuracy — meaning it contains exactly what the label says, and in the correct amounts — and potential contamination. This includes potentially harmful contaminants, such as mold and E. Coli. It also includes heavy metals such as arsenic.

What I like about that last part is that Light Labs puts its findings into context that any consumer can understand.

For example, their reports clearly state that a cup of brown rice typically contains about 10 micrograms of arsenic.

So, if a supplement contains brown rice protein and, as a result, is found to contain 1.27 micrograms of arsenic, it helps consumers understand that these levels are safe and are coming from natural sources. (Not loose metal shards that fell off a conveyor belt during processing.)

Every SaltWrap formula now prominently displays the most recent testing results from Light Labs right on the product page.

This makes it easier than ever for consumers to determine not just whether a formula truly contains what it claims, but whether it is worthy of their trust.