#393 ‒ AMA #85: A guide to medications and supplements: determining what to take, what to skip, and how to know if they're working for you

Hey, everyone. Welcome to a sneak peek. Ask me anything or AMA episode of the Drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Attia. At the end of this short episode, I'll explain how you can access the AMA episodes in full along with a ton of other membership benefits we've created. Or you can learn more now by going to peterattiamd.com forward slash subscribe. So without further delay, here's today's sneak peek of the Ask Me Anything episode. Welcome to Ask Me Anything AMA episode 85. Today, we're talking about medications and supplements. This is one of the topics I get asked about more than almost anything else, and I think it's also one of the easiest areas to go wrong. People tend to ask me whether something is good or bad, whether they should take it or not, but those are, I I think, kinda the wrong questions. The right question is whether a specific intervention makes sense for a specific person with a specific problem, and that's what I'm gonna try to get to today. So in this episode, we'll cover why defining the problem matters more than picking the intervention, the different jobs a medication or supplement can do and why the evidence bar should move depending on the job, how to tell strong evidence from weak evidence and why mechanism alone isn't enough, why baseline risk changes everything and how relative risk can mislead you, how to think about the real downside of taking something, side effects, yes, but also cost, hassle, and opportunity cost, how to determine whether the supplement you're taking is having any real effect, how to stop taking something, why supplements specifically deserve a lot more skepticism than people give them. And finally, the short list of over the counter supplements that I think are probably worth the risk reward trade off. So without further delay, I hope you enjoy AMA number 85. Peter, welcome to another AMA. How you doing? Very well. Thanks. Good. We will get right into it today on AMA all around medications and supplements. So first question. Before someone takes any medication or supplement, how do you think that they should define what the problem is in a way that increases the odds that they look for and pick interventions that actually benefit them and reduce risk opposed to, at best, waste money and, at worst, cause other harm that they don't know about. You know, I think this is actually one of the biggest challenges from a from a sort of mental model standpoint is plaguing most people when they think about supplements in particular, but I think also, frankly, pharmaceuticals. So people are, I think, typically defining the problem at the wrong level of abstraction. So they'll say things like, I wanna be healthier or I want more energy or I want to pursue better longevity. And the challenge is that those are not really actionable problem definitions. They're vague, difficult to measure, very difficult to …