Four Questions to Ask Before You Follow Anyone’s Health Advice

We are constantly getting health advice from doctors, pharmacists, friends, family, television ads, podcasts, social media influencers and people we have only met online. In fact, I write articles giving you advice about how to think, what to eat and how to live.

Perhaps just last week a friend at lunch told you the magnesium she uses fixed her sleep, a television ad said that women over 60 need a joint supplement, and your daughter sent you a post saying that the vitamin you are taking is a waste of money.

Some weeks the advice keeps coming and contradicting itself.

When Health Advice Starts to Add Up

In a CDC national survey covering August 2021 through August 2023, nearly 76 percent of adults over 60 reported taking at least one dietary supplement in the previous 30 days. More than one in four, 26.5 percent, took four or more. The researchers noted that supplements can help make up for nutrient shortfalls but may also push the intake of some nutrients above the recommended upper limits. They also cite the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics on the need to watch for overlapping ingredients, excess amounts and interactions.

Remember, each piece of new advice is added to what you already take: the prescriptions, the multivitamin, the calcium, the vitamin D. And by the time you turn 60, each suggestion from a friend is added to everything else in your medicine cabinet.

Why Some Advice Feels Right

The advice we act on is often the advice that made us feel better when we heard it. Advice like your friend’s comes with a story: she was lying awake at three in the morning, and now she sleeps through the night. If you have been lying awake too, her story gives you hope, and you may order the same bottle that evening. The joint-supplement ad may work because you fear losing the morning walks you take or your Tuesday golf game with friends. The post from your daughter may bring relief, because it lets you stop taking something you were not sure about.

The feelings of hope, fear and relief will usually tell you something about your situation. Whether the advice fits you is a separate question, and these four questions will help you answer it.

Ask: What Is the Advice Based On?

Is the advice based on one person’s experience, a theory, or a sales pitch? For example, your friend’s story is one person’s experience. She may have started the magnesium the same month she stopped drinking coffee after lunch, and she has no way of knowing which change helped.

An ad that says “clinically proven” and names no study gives you nothing you can look up. On the other hand, a named study at least gives you evidence you can examine. Then you still have to ask what the study found, who was studied and whether the findings apply to you.

Ask: Does This Advice Fit Me?

We want to know this because what helps one person can harm someone with a different health history or different medications. Your friend knows what is in her own medicine cabinet, and the answer for you depends on what is in yours.

According to the National Institutes of Health, iron taken with levothyroxine, a common thyroid medication, can make the medication less effective. Calcium might interfere with how well your body absorbs iron, and in the CDC’s 2017–2018 survey, calcium was the fourth most common supplement among adults over 60.

People with hemochromatosis, an inherited condition in which iron builds up in the body, are advised to avoid iron supplements. Advice that helped someone else was advice for her body, her prescriptions and her history – not yours.

Ask: What Happens If the Advice Is Wrong?

Keeping a sleep diary carries little risk if the advice turns out to be wrong. But stopping a blood pressure medication because a podcast called it unnecessary can be risky. The more a mistake would cost you, the more checking the advice deserves before you act on it.

One step costs almost nothing. The NIH recommends telling your doctor and your pharmacist about every supplement you take, along with your prescriptions and over-the-counter medicines, because they can tell you whether something new might interact with what you already take. Keep a complete list of the supplements you take and bring the bottles themselves to your appointments. Check with your doctor or pharmacist before adding a supplement that could interact with your treatment.

Ask: Who Benefits If I Follow the Advice?

Some advice is a sales pitch. The company that paid for the joint-supplement ad earns money when you buy the product, and a person recommending a product online may be paid to do it. Plenty of good products are sold, so knowing who profits proves nothing by itself. It is just one more fact to weigh along with the evidence.

Pause Before You Act

The advice evaluationmethod I developed is called Feel. Pause. Act. When advice arrives, you feel something: hope, fear, relief or doubt. Let the feeling register. Then pause long enough to run the advice through these four questions. Then act. You might follow the advice, ask your doctor about it, or decide against it. The pause gives you a chance to make a considered decision rather than simply reacting to what you just heard.

This does not have to take long. Four questions take a few minutes, and at the end of them the choice is yours.

Advice Worth Passing On

We have been handed advice all our lives, and we pass some of it on to our children and our friends. Before we pass it on, it is worth giving that advice the same pause we would give it for ourselves.

In my Substack column, Advice on Trial, I take one common piece of advice at a time, such as “It’s probably just stress” or “Better safe than sorry,” examine the evidence behind it, and give a verdict.

Let’s Have a Conversation:

Which piece of health advice have you followed because of how it made you feel when you heard it, and how did it turn out?