The features that actually send an endocrinologist looking for high cortisol are physical and measurable — striae over a centimetre wide, bruising from nothing, weakness getting out of a chair. The reference says history and examination are often insufficient even in a clinic.
Vitamin D works if you are deficient — strongly, for bone. The enormous trials reported as finding nothing largely enrolled people who already had enough, and two 2026 papers disagree about what that means for the heart.
Methylene blue is a real drug with one FDA-approved use — an antidote for a poisoning that stops blood carrying oxygen. It is now sold in dropper bottles for energy, and the standard clinical reference records fatal cases alongside serotonergic drugs.
The National Institutes of Health keeps a reference entry on sea moss. Its opening line says no medicinal value has been proven, and it lists arsenic, lead, cadmium and mercury among what the seaweed absorbs from the water it grew in.
113 studies — 80 of them in rodents. In humans, NAD+ boosters reliably raise NAD+ and reliably do little else. And for the intravenous version sold in wellness clinics, there are no outcome trials at all.
34 trials, 8,526 people. Zinc does not stop you catching a cold. It may shorten one by two days at low certainty — and the only moderate-certainty treatment finding in the whole review is that it causes more side effects.
Beetroot juice lowers blood pressure across 22 randomised trials. But juices with more nitrate produced smaller effects, and isolated nitrate supplements moved nothing at all — which is a problem for what the label says is doing the work.
Seven trials, 608 women. Creatine added 0.8 lb of lean mass over a median of nine months — and 16.5 lb to a leg press. Across 684 trials, placebo groups often reported side effects at least as often.
Four prospective studies looked for a link between electrolyte loss and cramp and did not find one. Sodium does help you retain fluid — that part is real, and it was measured in twenty-four people.
Thirteen trials have measured what bovine colostrum does to human body fat. One found a reduction — 0.4%, on 60 grams a day. The reviewers rate the whole body of evidence very low, and every non-randomised study was at critical risk of bias.