Pharmacists can be very helpful resources when it comes to questions about prescription drugs.
The operant word here is drugs .
What they are most definitely not expert on are nutritional supplements . In fact, a day doesn't pass by without having to dispell one falsehood or another conveyed to a patient about a nutritional supplement by a pharmacist.
Among the more common falsehoods told to patients by pharmacists:
"You have to take Niaspan. Sloniacin doesn't work."
Patent nonsense. A few years back, I was the largest prescriber of Niaspan in Wisconsin. Although I am embarassed to admit it, I also spoke for the company, educating fellow physicians on the value of niacin for correction of lipid disorders.
Then I shifted to Sloniacin due to cost--it costs 1/20th the cost of prescription Niaspan. I examined the pharmacokinetic data (pattern of release in the body), the published literature (e.g., the famous HATS Trial), and have used Sloniacin over 1000 times in patients. In my experience, there is no difference: no difference in efficacy, no difference in safety, no difference in side-effects. There is a BIG difference in price.
Unfortunately, most pharmacists get their information on niacin from the Niaspan representative.
"You shouldn't be taking vitamin D supplements. I have prescription vitamin D here."
What the pharmacist means is that you should replace your vitamin D3, or cholecalciferol--the form recognized as vitamin D by the human body--with the plant form of vitamin D, vitamin D2 or ergocalciferol.
Since when is a plant form of a hormone (vitamin D is a potent hormone, not a vitamin; it was misnamed) better than the human form?
I've previously talked about this issue in a blog post called Vitamin D for the pharmaceutically challenged.
The notion that D2 is somehow superior to the real thing, D3, is absurd. I use D3 only in my practice and have checked blood levels thousands of times. As long as the D3 comes as a gelcap, drops, or powder in a capsule, it works great, yielding predictable and substantial increases in blood levels of 25-hydroxy vitamin D. If it comes as prescription D2 (or over-the-counter D2), I have seen many failures: no increase in blood levels of vitamin D or meager increases.
Prescription status is no guarantee of effectiveness.
"Why do you need iodine? You already get enough from food."
The NHANES data over the last 25 years argue otherwise: Iodine deficiency is growing, particularly as people are avoiding iodized salt and the iodine content of processed foods is diminishing. The explosion in goiters in my office also suggest this is no longer a settled issue.
On the positive side, it is exceptionally easy to remedy with an inexpensive iodine supplement. That is, until the pharmacist intervenes and injects his bit of nutritional mis-information.
I'm not bashing pharmacists. In fact, Track Your Plaque's own Dr. BG has a pharmacy background, and she is an absolute genius with nutritonal supplements. But she is a rare exception to the rule: Most pharmacists know virtually nothing about nutritional supplements. You might as well ask your hairdresser.