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Placebo and Panacea: The Healing Effect of Nutritional Supplements

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Book cover Food and Nutritional Supplements

Abstract

No less than forty per cent of the British population take regular nutritional supplements Most take cod liver oil capsules and multivitamin tablets, but evening primrose oil, minerals and herbal remedies are also very popular. Nutrition supplements now const itute a multimillion pound industry. At the last estimate, the figure for the total cost of nutrition supplements had risen to an astounding 360 million pounds a year [1] and the market is set to increase for at least another four years. Self medication with supplements has increased in parallel with the use of alternative or complementary therapy. One in five Britons now use complementary therapies, while in the United States, there are more visits to providers of alternative medicine than to primary care physicians [2]. Similar trends are occurring throughout the developed world. For example between 25 and 75% of people living in the UK, Holland, Germany, Finland and Australia undertake some form of alternative or complementary therapy to treat the chronic malaise that orthodox medicine does not help. Japan spends one and a half billion dollars per year on herbal (kampo) remedies.

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Authors
  1. Nicholas W. Read
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Public Health Nutrition Unit Trinity and All Saints, College of the University of Leeds, Leeds, LS18 5HD, UK

    Joan K. Ransley  & Judith K. Donnelly  & 

  2. The Centre for Integrated Medicine Institute for General Practice and Primary Care, University of Sheffield Northern General Hospital, Sheffield, S5 7AU, UK

    Nicholas W. Read

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© 2001 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Read, N.W. (2001). Placebo and Panacea: The Healing Effect of Nutritional Supplements. In: Ransley, J.K., Donnelly, J.K., Read, N.W. (eds) Food and Nutritional Supplements. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-56623-3_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-56623-3_4

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-62598-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-56623-3

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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