"Take this, it's good for you!" Or maybe it isn't.

“Take this, it’s good for you!”

 You probably heard this growing up from your parents, or grandparents, or others, about lots of things. Medicines, foods, supplements, and even activities (“Do this, it’s good for you!”). You probably have continued to hear this from other people even if you are now grown: friends, family, people you have just met, and that most reliable of all sources, random posts (I was going to say “random people” until I realized that many or most of them could be bots) on the internet! So, should you take it? I mean, is it good for you?

I know my answer is going to be shocking: “It depends.”

On what? On a whole lot of things.

The whole idea that there is a general concept of things that are “good for you”, whoever you are and what you are hoping to achieve, is nonsense. What is good for one person – say an infant or a toddler – may well not be good for a middle-aged or older adult, and vice versa. And, of course, the most important question is “good for what?” What do you seek to have happen to you that this nostrum is “good for?” Do you even share the interest in achieving the end goal that the recommender presumably does? Lower cholesterol, lower weight, more muscle mass, stronger bones, having better balance or more stamina, improved sexual function, looking younger, better bowel movements, avoiding a deficiency disease like rickets, scurvy, or pellagra? Sometimes even cheap and easily available things from which big corporations or influencers do not make a lot of money, and that in fact do work well, are also unnecessary. Parents and grandparents may push things that their parents and grandparents told them were good for them, and they might have been, back once, but are not now. Back then, when our diets were often lacking in essential vitamins, scurvy, pellagra, and rickets were real issues in the US (and may still be in some parts of the world), but are not, generally, here now. In the not-too-distant past parents gave their kids castor oil, either as a treatment for a condition that the child might or might not have, like constipation or worms, but there are much better, safer, less unpleasant, and more effective treatments for both now. (That is not considering those who gave it as punishment!)

After you have answered the question of “good for what?” and decided that that “what“ is something you want to achieve or more toward, the next set of questions are “will it do that, does it actually work?”, “does it work for everyone the same or are there some groups of people (based on age, gender, health status, etc.) for whom it works better or not as well, and “what are the untoward effects that may, or even are likely to, happen, which may be far worse than the benefit?” Anabolic steroids, for example, do work to increase muscle mass, endurance, and power (see: sports stars) but also cause serious bad things (liver disease, testicular shrinkage, and a host of others). If it is legal and you are not competing in a sport where it is banned, it is up to you to decide whether the risk:benefit ratio is one you are willing to take (provided you are an adult, since in this area as many others, teens are poor judges of risk:benefit and do not have a good long view). Psyllium seed powders can be good for your bowels, lowering cholesterol, and helping to control your appetite, but some people have problems with the side effects. Testosterone, now being pushed by the Secretary of War who is competing with the Secretary of HHS and the President for being the administrations most macho ignoramus, can be good for some people who are deficient who should not be, but is far from a panacea that turns regular people into mindless Orcs (many medical professionals disagree, Doctors question evidence behind Pentagon testosterone plan). By the way, this is a good time to note the intrinsic contradictions in the “men’s health” movement. Its two big issues are prostate disease (especially cancer) and “low T”. Testosterone will not only make prostate cancer (or even benign prostatic hypertrophy) worse, blocking endogenous testosterone is the mainstay of treatment for prostate cancer. Oh, well, let’s see what it does for Pete Hegseth.

Some things generally are good for you. For example, age-appropriate vaccines are good for almost everyone (except those with known allergies to its components or previous severe reactions, by which I mean things like Guillain-Barre Syndrome, not a sore arm or short-term fever). Virtually all vaccines for children and adults (MMR, DTP, meningococcus, chicken pox, H. flu, influenza, Covid, shingles, polio, etc.) are really wonderful miracles that save thousands (sometimes millions, see: “Covid” and influenza) of lives, even more thousands or millions saved from serious morbidity, and with a very low rate of any significant negative effect. This is true. If you hear different information from your favorite TikTok star or Facebook friend, or Secretary of HHS, they are wrong.

Some things are generally bad for almost everyone, like taking dangerous drugs for unapproved indications (e.g., ivermectin for Covid), not to mention drinking or injecting bleach! The internet is full of recommendations for magic bullets that will cure whatever ails you or doesn’t even ail you but tells you it will or might if you don’t buy their solution. These claims are no more reliable than the clothes, makeup, hardware, and amazing items that will solve all your household worries. That is, some may be of value, for some people, in some circumstances, but often are not and even are dangerous, but all make money for those selling them (or in the modern world, selling their ability to influence others to the companies that make the products).

A big issue, it seems, is whether to take drugs, especially prescription drugs, manufactured by big, evil, pharmaceutical companies and heavily advertised by them, or to take “natural” over-the-counter drugs made by any-old-person or company and pushed by – any-old-person (or bot). Pharmaceutical companies are evil, as are most huge for-profit corporations (and they are usually the most for-profitable!) because their profits, not your health, is their main function. This does not mean that their products (or at least all of them) are not effective or safe when “used as directed”. They have two important characteristics non-prescription, even “natural” remedies, do not. First, they are tested, and approved after an extensive process, by the FDA (or were, before the FDA was decimated by the administration), which other remedies are not. Second, the doses are standardized, so you know what you’re getting. Even when plants (natural) are the basis for the drugs – say willow bark for aspirin – dosing is an issue. How much willow bark? From how old a tree? Growing in what setting? An aspirin tablet is standardized. Taking unregulated medication is akin to taking street opiates – you cannot be sure what, and how much you are getting. Plus, remember “natural” is not intrinsically good, safe, or protective. There are at least as many natural poisons as beneficial substances. If something you ingest, “natural” or manufactured, has a biologic effect that you desire, it also can (and likely does) have biologic effects that you do not desire (“side effects”, a term meaning biologic effects you don’t want). Testing and standardization are keys. Not that this in any way excuses the rapacious profit-taking of Pharma, but neither does it of those selling unregulated nostrums.

Finally, and I have said this before and will say it again, when thinking about whether something is “good for you” and whether you should take it, anything that sounds too good to be true probably is.

"If the only tool you have is a hammer..."

 “If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”.

 This old adage has been applied in many contexts, and sometimes appropriately to the work of medical specialists, particularly those who do procedures. It is something that family physicians and other primary care doctors are only too well aware of; before referring a patient to a specialist equipped with their hammer, we like to do our best to make sure that this is the right tool for the job. Perhaps, metaphorically, the family physician has the full range of tools on their belt and can thus address most medical problems, but sometimes the complexity of the treatment that a patient needs requires someone with great expertise. Pushing the metaphor, a general contractor might think that a particular job needs a skilled electrician.

Sometimes, really a lot of the time, subspecialists are consulted for their opinion of a problem, because it is an area in which they have in-depth knowledge. This is not a bad thing at all, as long as that opinion is guided by the evidence that exists and not by the doctor having limited their knowledge to the extent that they know only one approach, or, worse yet, are guided by the potential to make money doing a procedure. This happens, but, thankfully, less often than it could. Most commonly, the issue is not lack of knowledge on the part of the specialist, or even greed, but rather a sense of what others expect of them.

If you present to a primary care doctor with chest pain that sounds like acid reflux, they’ll probably prescribe treatment for acid reflux, with caution about changes in the character or frequency of the pain. If the pain sounds a little more suspicious for cardiac angina, they might refer you to a cardiologist. After examination, history and physical, the cardiologist might think it is probably acid reflux. But – and it is a big but – because they are a cardiologist there is a good chance that they will maybe do more tests, expensive and possibly invasive, because, since they are a cardiologist, missing a potential cardiac diagnosis would look worse. Plus, even if the cardiologist is not greedy (or is even on salary, not paid per procedure) the organization they work for might want them to run profitable tests.

For the society, this means a lot of extra tests are done, and this is costly. For the individual, especially if they are uninsured or poorly insured with a big deductible or co-payment, it can be particularly costly. Plus, for the individual, it can be risky – few procedures have no risk of harm, and the more extensive and invasive the greater the risk. That said, they can also be beneficial or even life-saving. The key is to do them when they are necessary, or the evidence suggests that the probability of benefit outweighs the risk of harm, and not otherwise. Of course, we ourselves, patients (or, to use the English word, people) often demand an “answer”, even if the answer is not going to be clear and/or the methods for obtaining it not without risk. When I tell people that the results of their tests to rule out potentially dangerous causes of their symptoms are normal (I try to not use “negative”, which sounds, unsurprisingly, negative!) they often respond “But what is it?” I have to tell them that I still don’t know, but I have discovered it is not something that is really bad. That is always a good thing. Finding out that the cause of your symptoms is not cancer, for example, doesn’t tell you what it is, but it is  lot better than finding out that it is cancer!

Of course, this whole incentive to intervene, to do more sophisticated, high-tech, complex, invasive, and expensive tests or treatments, applies only to that segment of the population that is well-insured or rich. It is an incredible source of inequity, because a different set of decision rules is applied to different groups of people depending on their ability to pay rather than the medical need (or lack thereof). Yes, people with good coverage may get too many tests, which not only cost a lot and have some risk of harm in themselves, but also can snowball into needing to repeat tests or do more complicated ones if there is a suggestion of abnormality in the first set. [Think of the math in terms of something as “simple” as panels of laboratory tests. “Normal” is usually based on 2 standard deviations from the mean value in that lab, 95%, so 5% of normal people might have an “abnormal” test result. But if 20 tests are done – and their results are independent of each other – the probability that someone’s results are “normal” on all 20 might be .95^20 or about 35%!] This can result in harm to people with money.

However, it is still more common for people without money or good insurance to suffer harms because they do not get the testing and treatment needed. And, unsurprisingly in the US, racism enters into the mix; Black Americans are less likely to get recommended diagnostic and treatment interventions for heart disease than White, even when they are insured!

What can be done? Changing medical education to teach that interventions should be done based on the overall evidence, not evidence selected to lead in a particular direction, could help. This has actually improved; when I was in medical school most of the surgical literature, for example, was case series (“We did this procedure on X people, and this many got better and that many died or got worse”) without control groups or controlling for how sick people were. (A famous study in my medical youth compared surgical intervention for coronary artery disease with medical treatment. Surgical was better. Of course, all the people with other diseases that made them at higher risk for surgery were allocated to the medical treatment group!)

Another very big thing would be to make sure EVERYONE is adequately insured. Not more people, but everyone. And, best, with the same insurance, so there is no gaming the system to get the folks whose insurance pays the most. If everyone has the same insurance – most simply, improved and expanded Medicare for All, there is no financial reason to do, or not do, tests or treatments on anyone (this would not,of course, cure racism).

Also, more primary care doctors would be great. As research presented by Etz and Stange at the recent Society of Teachers of Family Medicine (STFM) conference, and published in the Annals of Family Medicine has shown, currently primary care sees 50% of all physician visits (500,000,000) with only 30% of the workforce and <7% of the dollars (and, for the academic researchers, 0.2% of NIH funding).  More primary care physicians, which would almost certainly result from (and probably require) a lot larger portion of the money spent on health care to be directed to primary care, would almost certainly lead to more equitable and higher quality care for everyone.

A highly-placed non-medical health care executive once asked me (a family doctor) why he would go to me with a prostate problem instead of a well-known urologist. Skipping over “how do you know it’s a prostate problem?” I said “I guess it depends upon whether you want surgery or not.” Oversimplistic, perhaps, since urologist might provide other options, but not entirely unrealistic. The urologist’s job may be, in part, to care for prostate problems, but their training is to operate. 

By the way, the executive had no follow up questions.