Caffeine isn’t for everybody. While a fresh cup of coffee is a pleasant “jump-start” to my day, it gives my sister Sara serious heart palpitations. And if my husband ever drinks coffee after noon, he won’t be able to sleep that night.
We are amazingly unique individuals when it comes to medicines and supplements, too. A single dose that gives relief to one person can totally fail to help someone else, even cause distressing, even dangerous side effects.
One hospital I worked at had assigned the pharmacy the responsibility of storing and delivering special pumps that delivered intravenous pain medicine directly to a patient the push of a button attached to the machine. Patients liked them because it beat waiting in agony until a busy nurse got around to giving them a shot of pain medication.
Unfortunately, some people didn’t seem to get any pain relief from the pain medicine in their pump, even after getting multiple doses from both the machine and the nurse. It as if the medicine didn’t work for them, because when the surgeon switched them to a different pain medicine, they’d get relief after just one dose.
No medicine works the same in everyone. Medicines and supplements that work just fine for some people may not work at all for others.
When a doctor prescribes a medicine, they expect it to help you, and most of the time, that’s what happens. But if you take a new medicine and nothing happens, something needs to change. If a blood pressure medicine doesn’t lower your blood pressure, your doctor will either increase your dose or change you to a different medicine.
Many of us are looking for ways to improve our health or increase our energy. I find that when I ask people who are taking supplements why they take them, they aren’t always sure. And when I ask them if their supplement is helping them, they shrug their shoulders.
Since no medicine or supplement works for everyone, how can you tell if your supplement is actually helping you? One of the easiest ways is to start a symptom diary before you start on any new supplement.
Memory is a funny thing. If you wait until AFTER you’ve been on a supplement to recall how you were feeling or doing before you started it, your description will not be very accurate. That’s because our ability to recall exactly what happened before a particular event is not nearly as complete or accurate as we think it is.
In the world of human research, this difference between how a study participant remembers things before and after an event is called “Recall Bias”. Most studies are carefully designed to avoid recall bias because the difference between what is remembered later by a study participant is often startlingly different from what really happened.
With a symptom diary, you can compare your “before” description of your symptoms or energy level to how you are doing “after” you start taking that new herbal product or supplement, helping to eliminate the discrepancies that can creep in when you try to remember how you felt before you started it.
Since not everyone responds to every medicine or supplement, why continue to waste your time and spend money on something that isn’t helping you?
Here Are 4 Tips on How to Use a Symptom Diary Successfully:
- Decide exactly what you expect/hope the supplement will do for you.
Do you hope it will help you sleep? Reduce your knee pain or stiffness? If it worked, how would life improve for you?
- BEFORE starting the supplement, document how you feel NOW.
Physically record your symptoms or what you hope will change BEFORE you take your first dose. Score yourself on scale of 1 to 5 or 1 to 10 on the current intensity of each symptom or just describe the symptoms that bother you the most at least a day or two before you start your new product.
- Compare your “before” scores to your “after” scores.
In the words of a Chinese proverb, “The palest ink is better than the best memory.”
- Based on your scores, decide if your supplement is worth continuing.
This can help you decide whether you really are doing better now that you’ve been taking it, and whether your supplement is worth purchasing again.
