Educational strategies to support patient safety with dietary supplement use

5^th International Meeting on Complementary and Alternative Medicine & Therapies

September 18-19, 2017 Charlotte, USA

Kristy Appelhans

Herbalife Nutrition, USA

Keynote: Curr Res Integr Med

Abstract :

Seventy percent of US consumers incorporate some form of dietary supplement use into their routine nutrition/ health regimen. In fact, most dietary supplements in the US are freely accessible by consumers and these substances are perceived to be associated with a variety of benefits. The internet has become an endless resource for consumer information from symptom checking and self-diagnosing websites to sites which support selftreatment via supplementation. Therefore, it is highly possible that dietary supplements are being used before a patient seeks professional care for a health concern and/or a patient will incorporate personal supplement use in addition to a medically recommended and supervised treatment protocol. This review will present various consumer trends related to dietary supplement use which can help guide patient counseling to support the safe use of supplements while under treatment.

Biography :

Kristy Appelhans is the Senior Director of Global Post-Market Medical Surveillance at Herbalife Nutrition. To date, she brings nearly 20 years of experience working in a diverse capacity within the health and fitness industry. She has completed her undergraduate education in Clinical Nutrition in 2003 and subsequently completed her Doctorate in Naturopathic Medicine in 2007. She has been in private practice since 2009. In 2016, she also completed a Masters in Science in Regulatory Affairs. As the Head of Safety at Herbalife Nutrition, she oversees a comprehensive global post-market safety surveillance program and nutrition safety education. She has a broad scope of expertise related to the technical, functional, and clinical aspects of consumer safety. She has been the lead author for more than 14 peer-reviewed articles, co-authored a global industry guidance document for the collection of adverse events, and recently co-authored a book chapter on the technical and functional aspects of adverse event collection and reporting.