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AMA-helmed medical journals twist nutritional science and the mainstream media gobbles it up. Both are financially supported by Big Pharma.

On December 17, three studies on nutritional supplements were published in the same issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine. Practitioners, consumers, and scientists-both integrative and conventional-dismissed the studies as inconclusive, poorly interpreted, structurally questionable, and much too vague to truly analyze the benefits of supplementation.

It’s not surprising that “leading” medical journals and doctors continue to argue against natural alternatives to pharmaceutical drugs-they’re even more drug and drug money-dependent than even the average American. For example, doctors frequently rely on drug companies to pay for mandatory Continuing Medical Education (CME) classes, while journals like the Annals of Internal Medicine are utterly beholden to the advertising dollars of drug companies.

Unconvincing studies on dietary supplements are nothing new. However, these three had a unique advantage: in what appears to be an attempt to generate media buzz, they were accompanied by a scathing editorial that gleefully declared “case closed” on the effectiveness of dietary supplements.

The editorial, entitled “Enough is Enough: Stop Wasting Money on Vitamin and Mineral Supplements,” based its “decree” on those three flawed or inconclusive studies. Keep in mind that at this point, there are hundreds of thousands of scientific studies suggesting that supplements can be valuable.

As noted by ANH-USA board member Dr. Ron Hoffman, the compliance of patients to these particular “negative” studies’ supplementation regimen is unclear. “Recall” studies-where participants self-report whether or not they complied with the experiment’s protocols, sometimes years before-are notoriously unreliable.

We might add that one doesn’t really know for sure what the individuals took, what doses it contained, whether the right co-factors were taken, and of course whether the individuals were deficient in the substance to start with. In some cases, scientists devising studies do not even seem to know much about what they are studying.