Chris Kresser: Part of the case review is that they list out what supplements they’re taking, and then I will always prescribe supplements as part of the treatment protocol, of course. And at the end, when I do that, I often will say something to the effect of, OK, so you’re taking all these other supplements. Let’s go through them, and in general, here’s what I would suggest. If there’s something that you were prescribed or that you just decided to take on your own a while back and you don’t think it’s helping you or you don’t know if it’s helping you, I would suggest stopping that right away. If there’s something that you really believe is helping you and it doesn’t conflict with the treatment protocol that I’m prescribing, then I don’t have a problem with you continuing that, and the other thing would be that I think it’s a good product and it’s not causing any harm. That usually works pretty well. If it’s a question of me prescribing certain supplements and then the patient wanting to replace those with others that they source on their own, what I say is, Not all supplements are created equal. There’s a tremendous difference in the quality and reliability of products, the active ingredients that they contain, the fillers and binders and other added ingredients, and just the therapeutic potential. Part of my job as a clinician and a researcher is to figure out which of these products are most helpful, and I also have products that I have used and have experience with and know how they work and have initial testing and follow-up testing that confirm that they work, and so I strongly recommend that you use these products for this reason because they are the most likely to get you the results that you’ve come to me to get. I say, You have no obligation to buy them through us, which is true. We don’t force patients to do that. We provide them to you as a convenience. You’re welcome to order them through us. You’re also welcome to get them anywhere else that you want to get them, but if you do do that, I would strongly recommend that you get the same exact brand that we’re prescribing because if you don’t, we can never guarantee results, but we can’t even suggest that you’ll get the same results that we would expect if you don’t use the supplements that we’ve prescribed.
I hope that helps a little bit, Marcy. I don’t think it’s a good idea to force patients to buy supplements through you. Generally there are patients that want to do things on their own, and there are certain patients that are just going to do that. But what I can tell you—and we’re going to talk about this more when I talk more about the supplement store—is we’ve done some internal research. When I was deciding whether I was even going to do a supplement store for our patients and for your patients, too, I wanted to just see, well, what percentage of our patients are actually ordering supplements through us, and what percentage are going off and ordering somewhere else? And we found that over 80 percent of our patients are ordering supplements through us. So for us, this isn’t a huge issue, and it may be, in part, because of what we tell patients. Hopefully that’s useful to you, Marcy.