An excerpt from The Right Supplements: A Doctor’s Method for Knowing What Your Body Actually Needs.
One afternoon a few years back, a new patient, Mrs. Patterson, came into my office lugging a big plastic grocery bag that rattled with every step she took. She plopped it down on the counter, gave me a tired but hopeful smile, and started pulling out bottles. One after another, thirty-two in total. There were multivitamins in giant orange containers, fish oil softgels, probiotic capsules, turmeric curcumin, ashwagandha for stress, collagen peptides for skin, magnesium for sleep, vitamin D because someone said it helps mood, B-complex for energy, and a few others I can’t even remember now.
She told me she was spending close to $300 a month on all this. She’d been faithful about taking them for over a year, swallowing handfuls morning and night. Her goal was simple: more energy, fewer aches, better focus as she hit her fifties. But when I asked how she was feeling, she shrugged and said, “About the same, maybe a little better on some days, but nothing dramatic.”
I didn’t judge her. I’ve heard variations of this story hundreds of times. What strikes me every time is how little any of us know about whether those bottles are doing what we hope. Mrs. Patterson had never tested for the things she was supplementing. She was going on articles she’d read, friends’ recommendations, labels promising “immune support” or “vitality.” And she’s far from alone.
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The problem with asking the wrong question
Here’s something many parents of preteens have experienced, in one form or another. You come home from work and notice, behind the half-closed blinds, that the window is broken. Your twelve-year-old son has been home all afternoon. You ask, “Did you break the window?” He says no, and he means it, because it was his friend Tyler who threw the ball. You ask, “Was anyone else over here today?” He says no, just him. True. You ask, “Did something happen while I was gone?” He says no, and that’s true too. Nothing happened. Not today. The window has been broken since yesterday afternoon, hiding behind those blinds, and every question you’ve asked assumes it just happened.
Three questions. Three truthful answers. And you still know nothing about your window.
Finally, you drop the detective act and say, “Tell me how this window got broken.” And out it comes: Yesterday. Tyler. The baseball. The decision to close the blinds and hope that somehow you wouldn’t notice. Not a lie anywhere in the conversation, just precise answers to the wrong questions, from a boy who was never going to volunteer one word more than what was asked.
The answers were not the problem. The questions were.
If you’ve spent any time using AI, this may sound familiar. Ask a language model a vague question and you get a vague answer, technically accurate, reasonably helpful, and utterly generic. It tells you what you asked for. It doesn’t tell you what you needed to know, because you didn’t ask for that. Unless you ask it to, it may never say, “That’s not quite the right question.” It answers what’s in front of it, the same way a twelve-year-old answers what’s in front of him, honestly but without volunteering a word more than necessary.
The problem isn’t the AI. The problem is the question.
We do the same thing when we look for health information. You’ve been tired for months and want more energy, so you search “best supplements for energy.” You get a list. You buy a few. Four months later, you’re still tired and you’re out $150. The list wasn’t wrong, exactly. It was answering a question about the average person who types those words, not about you. You have a specific age, specific medications, a specific history, specific lab values if you’ve ever had them checked. No general list knows any of that. No general list can.
The right question (the one that would actually get you somewhere) isn’t “What supplements help with energy?” It’s something closer to “Given everything that is specifically true about me, what nutritional or physiological factors are most likely contributing to how I feel, and what does the evidence actually say about addressing them in someone with my exact profile?” That question has a real answer. A specific, personalized, useful answer.
Most people walk up to an AI chatbot the way they walk up to Google, typing in the question they think they should be asking. Best supplements for fatigue. That’s the move worth flipping. Instead of typing your guess at the right question, you ask the AI to help you write the question first, then to answer it.
The result isn’t a list for everyone. It’s an analysis for you.
This book looks like it’s about supplements. It is, but only on the surface. The real problem is bigger. Modern medicine creates new information faster than any one doctor, or patient, can keep up with. Each piece may be correct. But correct isn’t enough. Good health decisions come from seeing how the pieces fit together, and those pieces are almost never in one place at one time.
So instead of a list, it gives you a process, four questions you can put to any supplement, or to any health decision: Do I actually need this? What’s really in it? Is there solid evidence it works? And what is it likely to do for someone like me?
Here the “this” is a supplement. Later in your life it may be a medication, a scan, or a screening test, and the framework does not change with it.
By the end of this book, you’ll know what we did with Mrs. Patterson’s thirty-two bottles. The number went down. Her understanding went up. “I know what I’m taking and why,” she said. “That’s different.”
It is. And by the end of this book, you will know too.
Earl J. Campazzi, Jr., is a concierge physician in Palm Beach, Florida, who brings more than thirty-five years of clinical experience and four board certifications to his practice, bridging traditional medicine with modern technology. He is a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and also holds three degrees from Johns Hopkins University, including a Master of Public Health from the School of Hygiene and Public Health, and an MBA from Duke University. He was formerly an instructor at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and the Mayo Clinic School of Medicine.
His hospital affiliations include Cleveland Clinic Florida, Jupiter Medical Center, St. Mary’s Medical Center, Good Samaritan Medical Center, HCA Florida JFK Medical Center, and Alan B. Miller Medical Center.
Dr. Campazzi is the author of The Right Supplements: A Doctor’s Method for Knowing What Your Body Actually Needs, Better Health with AI: Your Roadmap to Results, Living with Pancreatic Cancer: A Patient and Family Guide, and Just Diagnosed with Metastatic Pancreatic Cancer: First Steps and More. He contributes to discussions on preventive medicine, concierge medicine, artificial intelligence in health care, and patient advocacy. He shares updates on LinkedIn.
