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Comment on NHS staff battling wave of food supplement disinformation

We have a shortage of doctors partially because they’re often fighting fires with short term solutions. Providing reactive medicine instead of preventative. Treating symptoms instead of underlying root causes.

I’ll give an example; a common ailment for women is iron deficiency. A shit side effect of losing a lot of blood once a month. To cure this, many doctors will prescribe iron tablets. Not enough iron? Take iron tablets! Seems logical enough, yeah?

The problem with iron tablets is they fuck up your stomach. They’re difficult to digest, you get painful jet black shits, and never quite feel right while taking them. They also have a shit absorption rate. Only a fraction of the iron in the tablet is actually absorbed by the body. And they take weeks to bring you back to sufficient iron levels.

If instead there was a concerted effort to educate women to include spinach, varied beans and legumes, tofu, figs, dates, broccoli, pistachios, etc. Foods rich in iron, into their daily diet, then the amount requiring prescription iron tablets reduces significantly because they’re getting iron in their diet every day.

But many aren’t taught these things. They’re taught if you start feeling shit, come to the doctor, we’ll take a blood test and prescribe you some tablets that will take weeks to help, and make you feel like shit the whole time you’re taking them.

Repeat the process again in 6-12 months when your iron levels inevitably drop again because the root cause wasn’t fixed.

This is what I described earlier as a “bad experience” with professional medicine. And is part of why there’s a doctor shortage, because many aren’t fixing root causes but immediate symptoms instead. Creating a larger demand than there is supply of doctors.

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MareOfNights@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
That just sounds like you get too much iron from the pill.

But no, this is still the job of a dietician not a doctor. A GP could give you your bloodwork and send you to a dietician with that. You don’t need a medical degree to be a dietician. It’s simply not the same job.

(Also spinach is not considered a good iron source because of the low bioavailability of the iron in it. The best sources are mostly animals. If you are vegan it’s probably a good idea to supplement, just like Omega-3)

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DakRalter@thelemmy.club ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
It’s crazy how some people think medicine is just “take this pill” and nothing more. I had a severe blood test phobia, so bad that I even delayed getting cancer symptoms checked for a year because I was so scared of the needles.

When I eventually got it checked and my gp said I’d need a blood test, I went into a panic attack. He prescribed me three lorazepam. One for the morning of the test, one for just before the test and one “just in case”.

I didn’t take them because I know I have an addictive personality.

Another GP told me to self refer to the local talk therapy. After three sessions I went from crying at photos of blood tests to being able to get a two practice tests done with my therapist and then the actual test. Without getting dizzy or throwing up like I did as a child.

Medicine is and should always be about what’s best for the patient, not “here just take a pill.” Is anyone really going to say that I should have gone down the lorazepam route? Also the amount of times I’ve had SSRIs pushed on me when I didn’t need them. Once when I was 13 because I had autism related mutism. Instead of pushing my mum to get me assessed, I wasn’t even told that I could be autistic (aspergers back then), which is a big contributing factor to me being the basket case I am today.

This is not me deriding modern medicine, just pushing back against the argument that pills should always be the answer. Long term solutions are better than relying on quick fixes.

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