41. Why Your Doctor Shuts Down Supplement Questions (And What Should Happen Instead)

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I'm Dr.
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Mark Sue and welcome to the Functional Medicine Reality Podcast.
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Join me and our community weekly as we bring you unfiltered health from inflammation to longevity.
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Real stories, real people, real solutions.
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Experience real life health changes from both patients and practitioners, and learn how to turn cutting-edge information into real results in your own life so you can feel better, live longer, live healthier, and be confident and clear in your healthcare choices.
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Let's get real and get results.
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Hey friends, so if you've ever had an experience where you wish your conventional practitioner was more open-minded about non-conventional therapies, you're gonna like this one.
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Or you might at least like the first half of this one.
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All right.
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So let me introduce a term for you.
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It's called ontological humility.
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And it means we don't know what we don't know.
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All right?
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That's the humility part.
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And so what happens a lot in conventional medicine is I'd like to say a lot of it's just because of the time crunch, all right?
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The the lesser insufficient time for visits and more meaningful discussion.
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When patients ask conventional practitioners about therapies, supplements, herbs, procedures, let's say like hyperbaric oxygen chamber, even or ozone therapy, et cetera, when a practitioner is not familiar with it and they're asked to give an opinion on it, it's pretty common the answer is it doesn't work, or it's not good for you, or bad things can happen.
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All right.
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So it's just the bottom line is it's not right.
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It's unfair, it's unjust, all right?
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The real answer is I don't know enough about it to give you an answer.
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And there are conventional practitioners out there who will be honest and say that, but it's really common, and I know this from firsthand experience with my patients, when they see a a a former primary care doctor or a specialist, commonly it's a little bit of a cop-out, to be honest with you, in my opinion.
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It's it's a liability.
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Sometimes it's a liability response, but a lot of times I think it's just the easy way to shut down that conversation, if you will, right?
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And it's not to be, I believe they're not trying to be mean to the patients.
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They just don't have enough time or don't really want to engage in in a conversation.
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And it's a lot of work to keep learning new stuff over and over, right?
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So the practitioners who they they they're not inclined to spend the time to figure to learn something new.
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All right.
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Again, not a judgment, just saying that's the my strong observation and and conviction about how the conventional medicine works.
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Now, here's the flip side of that.
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A lot of patients, a lot of us, abide by the presumption that when something is non-pharmaceutical as a treatment, it's a supplement, it's an herb, that it's more natural and therefore better for us, healthy for us, maybe safer for us, okay, or all the above.
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And it's pretty easy to make that argument, especially if we're talking about bioidentical therapies, all right?
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Not just biodental hormones, but I mean vitamins, biodentical, other non-vitamin supplements, et cetera, putting aside, compartmentalizing the topic of the integrity of the supplement companies that make these products, which don't have a lot of regulations, don't have more meaningful regulation, all right.
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Putting that aside, I acknowledge that piece.
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The fact of the matter is a lot of non-pharmaceutical therapies, let's say especially the herbals, again, not passing judgment on them either, okay?
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So if you're a naturopath or uh you're into herbal therapies, I'm it's it's not a shade.
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It's just we only know what we know from rather limited research, okay?
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Supplement companies, herbal companies, they don't have the money to put in the research.
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They don't have the money to put in all the studies to pass muster for FDA approval level of studies.
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My dad, in you know, in another in other content, I'll make more comment about this.
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But my dad actually was a researcher for a major pharmaceutical company, and that's why we grew up in the city we l we grew up in.
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And uh he was an all-comer, all right.
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He was open-minded to both pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical.
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He tended to shy away from pharmaceuticals of certain types, all right?
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But that's the kind of balance and the origin that I come from, all right, the fabric I come from.
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But he had due respect for the uh at least the process of what require, what was required to pass a medication by FDA approval to get full presentation to the market, if you will, to the public for a pharmaceutical medication.
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It's a lot of money.
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All right.
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And the farms and the and the supplement and herbal companies don't have that kind of money.
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So when we don't have the data, when we don't have more information about how many of the supplements and herbs we use might have herb-to-herb interaction, herb-to-medication interaction, supplement to medication interaction, or whether any of the how much or whether various supplements and herbs might actually cause us some side effects, or in some patients be more problematic than other patients at the least, okay?
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We just don't know.
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So the bottom line is let's call a spade a spade.
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Let's be fair.
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Let's be fair on both sides of the coin.
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Yes, in the conventional medicine world, it is unfair for us as practitioners to say something is no good, bad, um, judge it when we just don't really actually know.
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All right.
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Similarly, let's be fair when it comes to supplements on herbs.
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We we also need to be open-minded that there may be things that we don't know about them either.
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All right.
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And that's the world we live in in functional medicine.
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The the the gray zone, the less known, we have lots of tools and lots of potential, lots of hope.
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But the flip side of the coin is we're wrestling with a lot of unknowns.
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That then it ultimately comes down to what's the risk we're taking, what's the potential risk, all right?
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The risk of taking fish oil, of taking folic acid, magnesium, et cetera, et cetera, minimal to none, arguably, okay?
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So there you have it.
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A little more piece of the reality of functional medicine as I see it, and the intersect between functional and conventional medicine.
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Keeping it real, keeping it real for me.
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You're welcome to I invite you to keep me in check and keeping it real.
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Keep up the good work that you're doing in taking care of yourself, making the decisions, the best decisions you can for you and your family, knowing that um some of these decisions are not the most easiest, they're not the easiest to make, as we're still wanting for more information to make even better decisions if we could.
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So fresh, just the way you like to.