Next time you see a package of Emergen C at your local pharmacy, take a look at the statements on the box. It says "designed to boost immune systems" because they cannot legally claim to cure your cold, treat your cold, or shorten your cold. Most doctors and pharmacists would look at this box and roll their eyes, but the vitamin/supplement/herbal industry is worth 36.1 billion dollars so clearly our patients don't feel the same. Does this mean that all of our vitamins, supplements and herbs are useless and unsafe? No, absolutely not. Supplements and herbs are vital to certain disease states and they have a great synergistic role with many of our drugs, but we need to be wary of false claims and poor data. Of course there have been calls for more transparency from both pharmaceutical and supplement manufacturers with no luck and for different reasons. Health literacy and access also remain as pertinent factors in our patients' ability to sort through drug and supplement information. Most of the data available on these supplements and herbs is not accessible to our patients and is written far above the average reading level of the country.

"Fake cures" are a whole other demon. Companies advertising these "cures for cancer"and "cures" for other tough diseases prey on the desperation of our patients and polarize them away from traditional and proven therapies. "Naturopaths" and "Healers" appeal to unscientific, and often dangerous claims in order to promise a cure to sick patients. Browsing websites like Natural News as a healthcare professional will boggle your mind and terrify you beyond all belief when you realize that THIS is what your patients are reading and sometimes, believing. Dr.Paul Offit from the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia recently wrote an article for the Daily Beast detailing some of the mechanisms these fake websites propose are behind Autism (take a quick glance, they're scary). If this was harmless it'd be a simple remedy of improved communication with our patients, but many of these "cures" have led to the death of children. These websites typically advertise "cures" just like the ones the FDA warned against, and feature fear-provoking headlines like "What Your Doctor is Hiding From You", "What the Pharmaceutical Industry Doesn't Want You to Know". It's a creepy way of swaying trust away from those who have spent 10+ years studying their trade and toward a grey face on the internet preaching conspiracy theories. Unfortunately, I also believe that the rise in misinformation and these conspiracy theories is stoked by the fires of our political climate (but that is a whole separate story). 

My personal response to this misinformation and these conspiracy theories? Educate, educate, educate. And communicate! Modern medicine cannot always provide a cure, and we do our patients a disservice by not giving them proper and achievable expectations up front. Many expect doctors to know it all, but science is a vast field filled with unknowns. Despite these unknowns, our patients need to know that currently our science, our FDA, and our healthcare system does everything in their power to ensure that patient care is safe and effective. If it is not completely safe or effective, we do everything we can to educate them on those risks. Pharmacists, doctors, and nurses dedicate years to public service, sacrificing our 20s, and sometimes 30s to our education. We leave school $200,000+ in debt. We don't do this for nothing. We are here to help, we are here to learn, we are here to educate. 

All in all we need to start remedying this by asking our patients about their supplement and herbal use. We need to be asking them where they get their health-related information. We need to ask what we can do better in their care so that they don't have to seek out fake cures like these. We need to set boundaries and expectations. We need to explain the synergistic role that pharmaceuticals and supplements have within our treatment regimens. We need to explain why polarizing against one or the other, isn't right. We need to combat fear and teach that there is so much more we have to learn from the scientific unknown.