Are supplements making a fool of you?

DEAR DR. ROACH: I am a 72-year-old retired operating room nurse. I grow tired of seeing endless television advertisements for “holistic” remedies that claim to cure everything from low testosterone and erectile dysfunction to baldness. The ones that claim to “cure” enlarged prostate are particularly infuriating. They might as well claim to “cure” breast cancer.

There’s an old saw that goes, “A man who acts as his own lawyer has a fool for a client.” I think that this is pretty much the case here. None of these is approved by the Food and Drug Administration nor has been proven to be effective in the treatment of any illness. They are not consistent from lot to lot, batch to batch or even bottle to bottle. Yet thousands, if not millions, of Americans continue to use them to treat themselves for real or imagined illnesses. — N.E.O.