I agree with Susie here again. "red flag"? Hardly. As I said before, I do not agree with needing to take a lot of these extra vitamins and holistic herbs sold in health food stores and what not. I believe a "normal and healthy" person usually does just fine without them if they are getting the proper nutrition they need, and eating somewhat responsibly.
However, I also believe that sometimes they can be effective, and are needed, and that's fine too. I will be the first person to admit that I do not eat right at all. I go through spirts where I eat the same thing every single day for months. Two months ago I ate at Long John Silvers, where I ate a piece of fish, piece of chicken, mac and cheese, a biscuit, and sweet tea. But, that was the only meal I ate all day. Currently I am on a Tim Horton's kick where I eat a turkey bacon club, mac and cheese, or a bag of chips, or a bowl of soup, (one of the three), along with a large icy cap and two fruit explosion muffins. Now, in my defence, I eat half at work, then bring the other half home, so I make two meals out of it, but again, that's all I eat all day.
I know this isn't the healthiest of food choices, but it isn't fired, so it is better than the previous right? At least at "Uncle Tim's" I get freash veggies on my sandwich all smothered in sweet mustard sauce, lol.
But here again, when my bowel issues came up July 4, as you already know, it wasn't pretty. We tried ATB after ATB, helped a little but not a lot. Colonoscopy showed basically nothing, I refused the upper GI and the barium enema which also would have showed nothing but my empty wallet. So,he started me on a whopping dose of a product called Align which at the time was a special form or probiotic, only sold by that company. The dose was 1 cap a day. He put me on 4 daily, 2 in the AM and to in the PM. Well I took them regularly and after about 4 days, I felt almost back to 90 percent, by a week, I was at 100 percent, no more rectal pain, no more nausea, no more bloating, and no more belly pain for the first time in well over 2 months and well over by this time close to 6 thousand dollars with basically no answers, no help,same pain. Which consequently could have doubled in price if I didn't have my own personal Doc going to bat for me when the GI doc suggested both a barium enema after my CT scan and a colonoscopy, then when I refused the enema, they went and actually wrote and scheduled me for an upper GI the very next day after my follow up from my colonoscopy a month earlier because my rectal pain, bloating, and abdominal pain and discomfort were still there and were not getting any better.
So like I said, he started me on Align, a special, one of a kind probiotic, meaning there wasn't at the time a generic. I paid about 47 bucks for 42 pills which lasted me about ten days. However, again, after taking them for 4 days I felt 90 percent better, and after a full week,felt just about 100 percent, not to mention I just felt good in general, much more happy, had a lot more energy, and everyone noticed, from family, friends, co-workers, my patients, but mainly myself.
So,I continued taking week too, and just felt even better still which I didn't think possible after feeling so bad for so long, but it worked. Well, after the second week I decided to stop talking them. Not two days later, some of my previous sings and symptoms started creeping back in again like the bloating, little belly cramping, and twinges of rectal pain once in a while. So, being the cheap ass that I am I decided to buy another probiotic, about 12 bucks. I took them also 4 a day, and a few days after that my symptoms were pretty much back to where I had started at to begin with. Lesson learned there I guess, you get what you pay for.
So during my last trip to Krogers, brand new out, finally there was a generic form of Align called, 4X Probiotic. And it is slightly different than align, but has all the things that Align has, which what the main ingrediant it was that was in Align that wasn't in all the others is something called Bifidobacterium infintis. And instead of paying 47 bucks for 42 pills, this was 28 bucks for 42 pills. So before I made the purchase, I consulted Doc who said, sounds like it is close enough to have the desired effect and outcome you need, so give it a shot. So I did and I have been on this brand for over a week and still none of the previous issues, so, knock on wood, I believe it's working as I need it to.
So, do I think the average person needs to add a probiotic to their medication lists? No, I absolutely don't, I also don't think that most people even need a daily vitamin either, but for some, the some like me who had a stomach virus that decide it wanted to make a permanent home in my belly, it was the right treatment for me. I have tapered them down now from 2 twice a day, to at night and 2 in the am, to now I am taking 2 total a day, one in the morning and one at night. In a few weeks I will just start taking one each day and will do that probably until January first, then I will stop them completely.
So LisaK, I can somewhat understand your point of view in your thinking that the makers of products such of these usually push people into believing that everyone needs them to maintain a healthy colon, which drives me just as crazy too. These over the counters do have a place in society, and can and have been medically proven to be beneficial to patients with whom they are medically warranted, but again, that might be as little as one percent of the population. And in my medical judgment and experience seems to be the elderly for to very simple reasons. 1) their bodies simple are shutting down and everything is moving slower inside and out, often causing mal-absorption issues, and 2) even though we provide very well balanced meals that are strictly regulated by the state health departments as far as total calories that have to be provided each and every day, which is also broken even further down into there has to be so much protein, fats, veggies, etc.
But keep in mind most states provide a diet from anyplace of 1800-2000 calorie diets. A lot of these elderly or post-op patients can't eat that many calories in a day, hell, even eating at Tim Hortons everyday I don't even eat that many calories a day.
So, back to the point at hand here, sorry for the long post but, these people pick at their food, or as I like to say "graze" all day long. So we do prescribe a lot of them a probiotic of some form or another to help keep them and there bellies and colons working together and happier. Besides that, trust me when I tell you it's a very very long work day when you are dealing with my 38 patients who half are either complaining of belly pain, or they are crabby because they haven't pooped yet today. I don't particularly enjoy spending half my shift handing out cups of MOM or gloving up and giving them all suppositories, contrary to what a lot of people here think. So the simple cheap kind works for them perfectly fine since theirs hasn't been caused by a virus, but more due to sluggish innards for lack of better terms.
Some herbs and supplements have their place and have been medically time and time again. Another one I personally use and many of my patients use is a product called Melatonin, which is something that as we age our bodies either stop making enough of or we just require more, I can't remember which. Either way, it's another thing you can get at a health food store, Krogers or your local pharmacy has it over the counter. The price ranges a bit, and that one does come in different strengths starting from 1mg up to 10 mg currently out on the market. It is a sleep aid. I believe the average and most common dose used is 3 mg. Its' perfectly safe and usually pretty safe and cheap.
So before laymen start labeling some of these things as "red flag" for medical fraud, do some research. Again, there is a lot of this sort of thing out on the market, claiming that if you take this product you to can have a penis that's 24 inches long and 16 inches around, or that you can loose 150 pounds in three days. And we all know thats a crap ton of bullshit. But do some "real" research on some of these things, ask your doctors, witch doctor or other, your choice, but become educated in the "correct" information prior to making a decision. Just my two cents for this evening, lol.
And one last little diddy here concerning this. I suffered and suffered, I was in pretty severe pain to the point that I was either taking percocet or vicodin, 1 or 2 of them every 4 to 6 hours just so I could stand at my med carts and stand long enough to be able to do a half ass job at the job I love where if I make a mistake there could be serious, very serious consequences, i.e. death of one of my patients. Now I needed that medication and was NOT over medicated because when you are in that much pain, your body uses that pain medication correctly and effectively, so you don't get that high, loopy, goofy feeling you get when you take it just for shits and giggles. Your body has a place to put the medication to work in the place it's needed, so you can function as you normally would. Taking the meds to just be taking them you do get high and loopy/goofy because in say laymans terms, the body has no place to distribute the medication, so it sort of free floats around not attaching itself to anything in particular, thus giving you that high drugged up feeling a lot of addicts are both looking for and craving.
I spent a lot of years preaching and educating people about not wasting money on such health products, and now I find myself taking quite a few of them. But again, for me some of them are situational. I believe I suffer from SAD or seasonal associative disorder or whatever the heck it's called. I seldom drink milk or any dairy at all, and due to the shifts I work don't get enough sun light if any at all. Over the past few years I have consequently noticed changes in my moods, energy levels, and over all depressive feelings, that seem to correlate with the time changes, also partly due to the fact that I have a vitamin D deficiency. Well guess what, I start taking Vit D and the changes that makes works so well that even I can tolerate myself, when before even my own doggies would run and hide sometimes lol, just kidding. A lot of this stuff for for lack of better terms a bunch of gibberish's and horse crap, but now, I am a true believer that some of it is not and can and is effective if your body needs a little something extra that you can't seem to get from the food you consume, or the life style you live.
Again as I often say, educate yourself, be a smart consumer, and most importantly, know your body and learn how to read what it's saying to you. You might be surprised.
Mashie