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Natural Supplements Popularity is Growing
Interview with Lorna Vanderhaeghe
Interviewed by Lyle Hurd
November 12, 2009
Lyle Hurd: It is a real pleasure to have an opportunity to talk with Lorna Vanderhaeghe. Lorna is the Associate Editor of Total Health, who’s been a contributor for over ten years. You’ve been in the business twenty-five years. Can you give me an idea of how people looked at health, particularly natural health and self-managed natural health when you started?
Lorna Vanderhaeghe: Well twenty-five years ago we were still trying to get doctors to even look at multivitamins with minerals, so we’ve come a long way in the last twenty-five years. We now have physicians recommending fish oil and talking to people about CoQ10 and recommending glucosamine sulfate for arthritis, so I think we’ve come a long way. We’ve still got a lot further to go, but in the sense that twenty-five years ago physicians were really not looking at natural medicine or diet or nutritional changes as medicine, and that’s really how we should be looking at them.
LH: Have you found that the general public is getting a fair shake when it has to do with informing them and again maybe their doctor mentioning to them that this might be a great adjunct to whatever they need to do to cure themselves or help them come through the kind of surgeries and other things that go on?
LV: Oh absolutely. I think we’re got just miles to go in regards to combining the best of mainstream medicine with the best of natural medicine so we can have the ultimate outcomes and the least amount of side effects. And rarely will a physician say it’s better if you try celadrin for your arthritis than putting you on Celebrex, but we know that combining different types of natural or research-backed nutrients with medicines in the best way to go. So no, we’re far from it.
LH: Do you think that if we had education to create awareness and we had budgets that could be used like we do with our doctors and our countries supplements, that financially that we would be able to go a lot further and be able to lower healthcare costs?
LV: Well I think we have the ability to lower healthcare costs just simply by getting preventing into the mix. And, you know, when the economy is bad people stop using drugs, there’s less deaths, and they go out there and they search for things that are cheaper and better for them to be treated with. I mean if you can’t afford your statin medications at eight dollars day, you may just walk into a health food store or the natural section of a pharmacy and buy something to help reduce your cholesterol naturally.
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