Okay. So, my doctor wants to sell me these. That’s kind of a major red flag for me, because I prefer to get refined drugs from my doctor that have had the ballast taken out of them. The best description he could give me is that they’re an herbal supplement with some manner of fiber component, and one of the blogs attributed to them indicates that it also has some sort of dumbass flower juice that binds to cholesterol all good. They do pretty reasonable science talking for an herbal supplement, and the doctor claims that actual tests have actually been run by actual scientists at actual scientific institutions actually confirming actual positive results for cholesterol, blood sugar (not really a concern for me, since I’m batting an emmer effing 6.0), and weight management, but I can’t seem to find them on PubMed using my limited brains and time at work to try and suss them out.
So, these things are $120 a month, take the form of some sort of nasty soluble fiber juice you drink before your biggest meals, and are kind of hard to pin down on the internet, since none of my typical skeptical resources have apparently done any investigation on them yet. I’ll see if I can get Steve Novella to look it over on one of his eight thousand writing outlets or maybe get a quick analysis from Dunning on Skeptoid, but in the meantime I figured I’d poll the electorate here and see if anybody 1) knew what in the holy hell these things were; 2) knew what their purported method of effect was supposed to be; and 3) knew whether they worked at all, or even had a plausible chance of working, and whether I wouldn’t be just as well served taking the also ridiculously expensive (but less than $120) fiber supplements I can get at my pharmacy and farting a bunch instead of this junk.
Looks like bullshit to me. Policosanol is one of the ingredients right? That has never been verified as working except by the company that makes it.
If a doctor is selling you supplements, that’s a red flag to me. Time to get a new doctor. Do you actually have a problem he’s trying to address with this stuff?
High cholesterol, off-target weight. How much is hard to say, since I’m not overweight by his estimation, but I’m made almost entirely of fat and bone with little muscle, so my offhand guess is that I need to lose about ten pounds and convert twenty more to muscle. Lipid profile isn’t high enough to merit bringing statins into the mix - just like thirty to fifty points out of his target (which is stricter for me because of diabetes) at the widest.
Yeah, then I’d concentrate on more natural and obvious things like diet and exercise instead of ingesting supplements, especially given a lot of the stuff out there showing that we don’t really have any good understanding of cholesterol’s role in killing us. Especially dietary cholesterol which seems to have been discarded as a major contributing factor serum cholesterol levels.
This. I’m in the supplement biz and Doctors are increasingly becoming very valuable targets for companies which create private label lines for doctors to sell. There are some laws that restrict how a doctor can profit from his patient, but just selling products doesn’t tend to run afoul of those laws. I can tell you doctors are very receptive to (ahem) “supplementing” their income with these products.
I never heard of this company, but that’s not surprising since as I said, it’s probably a private label line made by a contract manufacturer. I also suspect the ingredients are most likely safe and fine (although probably not earthshatteringly wonderful) and do have some scientific data to back them up.
You are essentially paying a premium for being on the ass end of a medical MLM.
Well, Fiber IS well established as a way to lower cholesterol, particularly psyllium. Try that instead – you can buy the raw ingredient for super cheap or in brand/flavored form as Metamucil.
Doctor’s shouldn’t be selling patients anything direct or even directing them to any brand other than some high quality drug required by some condition.
My doctor has me taking fish oil, vitamin d and niacin, but he sure didn’t tell me which brands to buy or try to sell me some out of his suitcase. He just tells me what quantity he would like me to take and leaves it at that.
If some herbal compound is effective then somebody will refine it, test it properly, and put it on the market. There’s no upside in hoping that your doctor has stumbled on some previously unknown compound that is only available in herbal form, especially since it has such a stupid pricetag. Fiber supplements cost a penny a pound, and if you can’t find whatever the active ingredient in the flower is supposed to be in proper pill form from a real company (no homeopathics, please!) then it ain’t worth risking.
Find a new doctor. There’s about a half dozen red flags in that story.
If you are inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt ask him for the citation to the refereed publication of the randomized double-blind trial that reported the efficacy of one of the medications or herbs he’s hawking to you.
He won’t be able to come up with it because it doesn’t exist. He’s either too stupid to know why that is a critical fault in his recommendation, or he’s just plain greedy and doesn’t give a crap.
Either way, you can’t trust your health to such a person. Run away, tell anyone you care about to stay away as well.
I carefully figured out what supplements I need after simple empirical study.
Sometimes beer is not enough. So I may, just may you understand, supplement it with bourbon. But on my bad days I use a Vicodin or Codeine supplement. And then I feel fine.
The next step is for your doctor to ask you to sell the Bios Life Suppliments to your friends and family as an easy and fun way to make a little extra money on the side.
Yeeeaahhhh…that’s kind of what I was afraid of. I JUST changed doctors because of crap like this. I’ll at least stick with him until the thyroid medication gets dialed in. Maybe I’ll grab a box of soluble fiber supplements and see if they do anything.
