I have a dessert recipe that takes just 15 minutes to make. It often bails me out when I need something QUICK to take to a potluck. First, I mix butter, milk, powdered cocoa, and sugar in a heavy pan. After boiling the mixture for exactly 2 minutes, I add vanilla, rolled oats, and peanut butter and stir in well. Finally, I quickly scoop out individual cookies onto on wax paper and let them cool.
My “No-Bake Chocolate Cookies” are a bit hit with my clinic coworkers. Unfortunately, my nephew, Peter, has to avoid them because he is severely allergic to peanut butter.
We are amazingly unique individuals when it comes to medicines and supplements. A single dose that gives relief to one person can totally fail to help someone else. While a fresh coffee is a pleasant “jump-start” to my day, it causes my sister Sara to have heart palpitations.
At one hospital where I worked, the pharmacy staff was responsible for storing individual pumps that gave out intravenous pain medicine. By pressing a button attached to the machine, a patient could get a dose of pain medicine delivered immediately. Patients liked them because it beat waiting in agony until a busy nurse had time to give them a pain shot.
The pain medicine in those machines didn’t always work as expected. Some people wouldn’t get any pain relief from a particular painkiller despite getting multiple doses from the pump device and the nurse. But when switched to different pain medicine, they got relief with 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 that’s what happens most of the time. But if you start a new medication and nothing happens, something needs to change. If a blood pressure medicine doesn’t lower your blood pressure, your doctor increases your dose or switches you to a different drug.
Many of us are looking for ways to improve our health or increase our energy. When I ask people taking supplements about why they take them, they aren’t always sure. And when I ask them if their supplement is helping them, they shrug their shoulders or say, “I hope so.”
If no medicine or supplement works for everyone, how can you tell if your supplement is actually helping you?
One of the best ways to find out if a supplement is working is to start a symptom diary BEFORE beginning 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 accurate. That’s because our ability to remember what happened before a particular event is not nearly as complete or accurate as we think it is.
In 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. The difference between what is recalled later by a study participant is often startlingly different from what really happened.
A symptom diary compares your “before” situation with how you are doing “after” you started taking a new herbal product or supplement. This helps eliminate any discrepancies that creep in as you recall and describe how you felt before starting it.
Since not everyone responds to medicines and supplements, why continue to spend money on something that isn’t helping you?
Here Are 3 Tips on How to Use a Symptom Diary for a Supplement:
- Decide 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?
- Score yourself on a scale of 1-5 or 1-10 BEFORE starting your new supplement.
Score yourself on the intensity of each symptom or just describe the symptoms that bother you the most, at least a couple of days before you start your new product. The key here is to physically record your symptoms or what you hope will change BEFORE you take your first dose.
- Compare your “before” scores to your “after” scores.
According to a Chinese proverb, “The palest ink is better than the best memory.”
This approach can help you decide whether you are doing better now that you’re taking your new supplement/herbal product, and whether it is worth purchasing again.
