I don't even prescribe supplements. They should be an adjunct to food, not a replacement for it. Patients leave my office with an understanding of what foods to eat and how to prepare them for optimal use. In this field, you need to read between the lines, look at what their emotional involvement is with food. You do all these things to get a sense for how this person came to have this problem.
People get to a disease by their own path.
You need to go back down that specific path with them to find out where it started, and work from there. My focus there was on Oriental medicine's perspective on food, nutrition, cooking and healing, based on the Taoist philosophy. In the Taoist view, health is maintained in the body when these two forces are balanced and harmonious. We looked at the role of food in this scheme. For example, salt is contractive and sugar is expansive.