Why Does My Holistic Doc Just Sell Me Supplements?

I’ve noticed a dramatic and eerie change in the population over the last 20 years (while overall health has deteriorated and almost everyone has multiple health problems):

“What Are You Taking for That?”

When people ask what they should do about some illness or condition, nearly 100% of the time, the answer is some supplement to take.

This is true whether the response comes from people on social media, knowledgeable health-educated friends — even trusted alternative-oriented practitioners. (I notice most people like to call them “homeopaths,” but they tend to call themselves “functional medicine practitioners.”)

You have a symptom, you take a drug. (Or in the circles I run in, a supplement.)

A supplement is assumed to be “the answer,” for natural health fans. But it’s really just a twist on the old pharma pill-for-every-ill doctrine.

What’s conspicuously absent in these conversations is any suggestion of lifestyle change, or really anything that involves effort on the part of the health seeker.

If I believed you could get well and stay well just by taking supplements based on your lab results, and eating gluten-free (still mostly processed) food, I’d tell you that, too! 

I’m sure I’d be wildly successful, if I came up with a gimmicky supplement or dietary claim (especially if it included a scare tactic about healthy foods) and hit up the internet with it.

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Profitable, But It Doesn’t Work …

Here’s the problem: that approach doesn’t work. And I am committed to helping people only with things that actually work.

Most people leave their functional medicine doctor with a bag of “hopium”: $1500 in supplements, and the dream that eating all these pills will make them well again. But: You need to come back next month, to get more!

You can already imagine how lucrative this is, for chiropractors, NDs, NMDs, NPs and even some MDs in private practice, who hang out a shingle claiming that they operate in holistic practice and specialize in natural and immune-supportive strategies.

That’s your main answer, right there, to why your natural health practitioner mostly orders labs, and then uses them to sell you supplements:

It’s the highest-revenue activity they do.

(Your office visit is not particularly profitable for them. Doing procedures on you — for example with an energetic device — is also not always very profitable, though sometimes they can hire a $20/hour tech to do it.)

Your “holistic” or “functional medicine” practitioner probably couldn’t even keep the lights on and the staff paid, if not for supplement sales. 

Your doctor also makes more money, the more labs she runs on you.

Your Holistic Doctor’s Little Secret

Did you know that lots of doctors and marketers simply put their names on the products of a handful of billion-dollar supplement companies (which, in turn, are owned by giant pharmaceutical companies)?

That’s right, your doctor generally knows little about the supply chain or “other ingredients” (excipients) in the supplements they sell. (I published this infographic in my August Substack on Vitamins C and D, but it bears repeating):

Source: Woodstock Vitamins (https://drnealsmoller.com/rant/the-14-mega-corporations-that-own-your-supplement-brand/)

If you ask questions about the supplements, your doc will say some words — but listen carefully, and see if you find the answers satisfying, or not.

Here’s a concerning thought: Given that 80%+ of supplements are now owned by Big Pharma, I would not be surprised if Pharma is bastardizing and adding stuff to their supplements. Given all of the shenanigans occurring in the Pharma arena (on steroids the past 2.5 years), the thought does cross my mind. 

No, I can’t prove that this is happening to your specific brand of supplement (or any of them). I receive questions daily that I can’t answer about my opinion of the thousands of brands now out there. 

I’m just planting a seed in your head, so you are at least AWARE of these little-known truths. Which can be rather disillusioning, I know … because we really want to believe that “natural” is “better.” 

I invite you to question that assumption.

You Can Call Them On It

You can probably ask your practitioner, though, point blank: “Do you make your own supplements, or do you private label another company’s products? And if so, what’s the company’s name?”

(If you ask that, you’ll probably be the only one who ever has. I’ve asked, and been told that I was the first to do so. I also asked my OB/GYN his class rank — where he graduated, in his medical school class — and his eyebrows went up. He, too, told me no one had ever asked him that before! I ask the same of lawyers.) 

If you ask your functional medicine doc who he’s private labeling for, he might be defensive, not wanting you to go buy from any number of other places, but you can put his mind at ease.

Tell him, “I’m totally going to buy it from you, if I buy it. But I like to do a little research on companies whose products I spend a lot of money on. So I want to go study their company and who owns it, and more about their sourcing and ingredients.”

(I highly recommend doing this. Beware of the false “sense of security” you might get, in words like “pharmaceutical grade.” Supplement manufacturers use this term as if that’s a good thing. My theory is that the companies touting their products as “pharmaceutical grade” are actually owned by drug companies at the top. To me, “pharmaceutical grade” means “highly controlled and synthetic.”)

Staring Down the Magical Thinking

Do you really believe you’ll get well, by taking $1,500 of supplements? Have you ever seen that work before?

Do you really believe that getting well can involve no significant effort on your part — to restore what has been damaged, and to clean up pollutants inside your body?

Do you really believe that if the numbers on your labs are “in range,” this means you’re healthy? More and more, I think people are realizing that their labs can swing wildly, based on multiple factors. Any particular lab result is nothing more than a snapshot in time, and it might swing significantly, in as little as an hour. 

Helping people eliminate the toxins in their bodies and return to optimal functioning actually works. And I think for the most part, functional medicine practitioners know this. However, they don’t know how to make a living helping people do it. 

Plus, it’s not all their fault. They’re up against the mentality of modern patients.

These doctors tell me that their patients tend to be very committed to the “magical thinking” (take pill B for symptom X).

They find their patients unwilling to “do the work” of getting well. Their jobs are hard enough — they’re running a business, too, not just trying to help you with your health problems. And trying to coax patients into taking major corrective action usually falls by the wayside. 

This is often true even among the better practitioners, the ones who aren’t depressed and burned out and operating a business “in the red.” It’s even true among the ones with a thriving practice and a waitlist.  

Even the ones who really care about you getting well and spend their evenings and weekends studying all the new developments in health and wellness find it extremely challenging to get patients to make major lifestyle and dietary changes — or undergo a rigorous detox. 

What Stops People from Truly Healing?

In my own work over the last 10 years, having helped 18,000 people detoxify, these two primary objections crop up often, among people who know they ought to take the plunge:

1. I’m scared of detoxing. 

Or more specifically: “I’m scared I’ll be too sick to function, as my body purges and sometimes has cleansing reactions.”

(I relate to this. After having spent 4 years in bed following my pharmaceutical injury in 1995, I was terrified by the same thing. That, and being pregnant or breastfeeding for most of those 4 years I was barely functional, caused me to wait years longer than I should have to start detoxing). 

Little did I know, detoxing rather immediately reminded me what good health felt like — I’d almost forgotten what it was like to feel GREAT! And it rapidly eliminated most of my symptoms, practically overnight.

That — and staying well and disease-free for 28 consecutive years now — keeps me committed to my whole-foods, plant-based diet and twice-a-year detoxing.

I can’t promise that you will experience almost-overnight joie de vivre and return of energy, but that was my experience. I was only 30 years old, so perhaps I had less work to do than a 60-year-old doing her first rigorous cleanse.

Some people do our detox several times in a year, peeling away layers of toxicity that give them incremental health gains. 

2. I don’t have any energy or time. 

Or: “I don’t have the bandwidth to prepare specific recipes and do the detoxing protocols.”

(I relate to that, too. However, if your energy TRIPLED, after a few days on the program, can you see how the time you get back could be a net gain, perhaps after years of feeling chronically wasted?)

The phenomenon of “running labs” is kind of a vicious cycle. The practitioners love it, because showing patients numbers motivates those patients to buy the supplements. And to come back for follow-up labs.

And bizarrely, most patients do keep coming back if some lab number comes “into range,” even if they don’t feel better.

Or if they feel a little bit better, but they still are very unwell.

Green Smoothie Girl Stands in the Gap

I wish there was a way for more practitioners to connect with us here at GreenSmoothieGirl. 

We do have ways to collaborate with physicians, but we don’t have any marketing team. We’re an education-oriented outfit that operates by word of mouth, and so good physicians find us, rather than the other way around.

Rhonda Rae, for instance, came to us 7 years ago, after her doctor found us and told her to go do the GreenSmoothieGirl detox. Here’s a photo of Rhonda Rae, after she did our program twice.

I’d love to build a bridge, between our work and the work of the overwhelmed doctors out there. 

Because over the last 18 months, doctors have been buried by a crushing new avalanche: 220 million recently vaccinated Americans, many of whom are suffering with unprecedented levels of autoimmune disease, neurological disease, and cancer.

Meanwhile, our work leverages the theory and practice of the greatest detoxification doctors from the last 2,000 years (but especially those of the last 70 years). 

And we do have the infrastructure, the team, and the bandwidth to provide excellent care to our detoxers. In fact, we’ve been doing so for 10 years. We stand in the gap between patients (and the work they know, in their gut, they need to do) and the modern practitioner’s tendency to focus on labs, procedures, and supplements.

We do the work that their practitioners do not have the time to do — answering their questions, holding their hands if anything confuses them, and keeping a beautifully run online community going. (Our veteran detoxers often answer before we even get to the new detoxers’ questions, even pointing them to chapter and verse in their detox manual!)

In the three years before Covid-19, Google was already eliminating all content that challenged or offered alternatives to Pharma. (You may have noticed that a huge number of the natural health books are no longer available on Amazon, either.) 

Even before the censorship became obvious to anyone who watches the news or participates in social media, Google had systematically eliminated us in the organic search results. We battled to bring back the 2 million annual visitors we used to receive, but to no avail.

If someone hears about us and wants to look us up to consider studying how to detoxify with us, they would have to already know about the GreenSmoothieGirl website. Otherwise, Google will lead them down the primrose path, to more-More-MORE Pharma solutions.

And you can look around to see what that approach has gotten us.

If you want to detoxify with us — giving it a try once, or detoxing twice a year with us (2,000 newbies start every January), check out my free video masterclass. It summarizes my two decades of work, in (a) researching human detoxification, (b) getting myself and my family well after our toxic exposures, and then (c ) helping 18,000 people get well, too. And, please assume that some of the links I may share, compensate my small business.