Supplements on Prescription ...

Standard procedure when consulting a Nutritional Therapist is to purchase supplements as recommended by the therapist and typed/written out on his/her prescription, as part of a Nutritional Support Programme to use alongside dietary advice given. This fosters a culture of responsible nutritional supplement usage and enables respectful collaborative work between nutritional therapists, other complementary medicine practitioners and nurses & doctors to take place. The reasons for this are as follows:

Safety of the Client: Most professionally registered nutritional therapists will check the safety of combining supplements with each other and with medications or herbs (where research information exists).

Quality and Purity: Single nutrients (e.g. minerals, vitamins, phytonutrients etc.) differ widely in strength and absorbability i.e. how much you get for your money and whence clinical effectiveness, dependent on type and your state of health. Again a well qualified nutritional therapist is able to advise about this. Certain nutritional supplement types have proven consistently to be a risk, pollution-wise (e.g. PCB’s, heavy metals, radiation etc.) A competent nutritional therapist is up to date with which brands and types of supplements are pollution free.

Unbiased: A professional nutritional therapist is bound by his/her ethic code, through their professional body membership, to select the best product to support your health and is not selling supplements on a commission basis.

Profit for Services: When a client chooses to purchase the same or similar supplements advised by a therapist through a shop or the internet, the client is paying another business for the work undertaken by his/her therapist.

The Nutritional Therapist will write a prescription with supplement product codes and names, detailing how and when to take any supplements and what they were given chiefly for. The client can then tel. request the prescription supplements using these product details by mail order using a credit/debit card / postal cheque from companies whose tel. numbers are written on the bottom of the prescription (either using a multinational one stop shop option or selecting to order through individual companies). The practitioner is then sent a record of what the client has ordered via post. Clients can re-order themselves between consultations, if they are still supervised and registered with a nutritional therapist, who can then monitor progress.

Supplements in most cases arrive by mail order in 24-48 hours. However, should the supplements prescribed and ordered by you not arrive within 3 days or arrive broken or damaged, you should notify the company you have ordered them from immediately as well as your therapist, to ensure goods replacement or prompting of the order. If you are unable to resolve problems that arise with your order within 2 weeks (an extremely unusual position) with the company yourself- please notify your practitioner who will try to resolve any problems with the prescription to your satisfaction.

EU Supplements Directive (ESD) will become law on 1 st August 2005 and dramatically reduce the range (300 NUTRIENTS stand to be BANNED in the UK) and amounts of nutritional supplements that can be used therapeutically. Prescribable nutrients remaining are known as the "Positive List" read more ...