I'll take the red pill or the blue one. But not five of each.

April 11, 2012 12:47 PM

So what's the cheapest route for custom vitamins?

I've been diagnosed with a long term health issue that from some of the reading I've been doing, seems like different vitamins help. A LOT Of different vitamins. The fact is I have a gag reflex. One or two pills I'm okay. Past that point, I'm fighting the urge to upchuck. One horse pill I can do. 7 or 10 pills I can't. I've tried. I just dread it so much that I forget to do it regularly. Which defeats the whole point.

I've heard of places that can custom make you a vitamin with everything you want in it and I've started looking into it. The basic research I've done has found A) a limited number of possible ingredients and B) very very high prices, even for the relatively cheap vitamins.

So who would be your recommendations here MEFI? What's the best way about it that won't break my bank?

posted by rileyray3000 to Health & Fitness (4 answers total)

Are you in the US? Do you have prescription insurance coverage? If a doctor writes you a prescription for custom vitamins to be compounded at a compounding pharmacy, that prescription may be covered by your insurance. If your current doctor isn't familiar with this, ask for a referral to an "integrative medicine" doctor, who may be.
posted by Sidhedevil at 12:53 PM on April 11, 2012

Have you thought about chewable or gummy vitamins? They are not custom, but they might make taking your vitamins easier.
posted by bove at 1:31 PM on April 11, 2012 [1 favorite]

What vitamins and what kinds of doses are you talking about here? There aren't that many of them, and some of them aren't required in very high dosages and/or are reasonably palatable, so you could dissolve them into a beverage or the like and never notice that they're there. Dissolving some cheap vitamin C tablets in some lemonade and adding a teaspoon of brewers yeast to a bottle conditioned beer would cover everything but A, B₁₂, D and E at a pretty solid level.

If you're not into beer or lemonade, there are other approaches - but those seemed like the obvious suggestions.
posted by Kid Charlemagne at 1:44 PM on April 11, 2012

Wait; before you go to the trouble of getting your phy to do a custom compounded medication check with insurance to see if it's covered! It may be excluded thus wasting the pharmacy's time and you ending up paying a large amount of money for a vitamin. And who knows if the pharmacy is part of your network!

Plus, most compounding pharms don't bill insurance which would require you to send the claim to insurance. Given that process you may not get close to what you paid back and a 4 month turn around time until a check is cut.

I've used ChronoMed. www.chronomed.com

The health assessment was able to match what I needed. The only downfall, IMO, was that they are packed in their one daily dose small plastic baggies. I felt that it was a lot of waste; but the shipping and reminders of when to orders were helpful. Price wise it was decent and I liked have the ability to alter their assessment suggestion by adding/deleting vitamins
posted by Bun Surnt at 7:58 PM on April 11, 2012