France has been the only place I’ve noticed where doctors will prescribe vitamins to sick patients, instead of medication. Wait. I think I was prescribed vitamins in Germany once. So maybe it’s a European thing. It’s sort of the opposite of les etats-unis! Anyway, this is what some vitamins look like here: liquid in small glass vials, about 4 inches long. You break off the ends of the vials to pour it into a cup with juice or water, then drink it. These B complex vitamins were prescribed by a doctor to my sweetie for a number of ailments including fatigue, but I don’t think they changed his fatigue level at all. The doctor also prescribed magnesium, which seems to be a cure-all in France, I swear. It’s everywhere. (Have you seen how magnesium is all over water products and cereals and gobs of other products?) Anyway, the magnesium gave him leg cramps. So for a while we had a bunch of vitamins sitting around.

If you have vitamins that you no longer use, and they haven’t expired, you can give them back to the pharmacy, so they can dispose of them properly (they most likely reuse the unexpired returns, though I’m not sure).

A note: I recently found out that some B vitamins are crap vitamins. They actually call them JUNK vitamins and apparently, these will drain your body of energy. To tell the junk vitamins from the quality (premethylated) vitamins, look at the label.

“Cheap vitamins (non-methylated) will use standardized “USP” vitamins such as “Thiamin USP (thiamin HCL) vitamin B1.” That’s the chemical form of vitamin B1, and it actually requires a donation of cellular energy from your body before you can use it. The form of B12 in cheap vitamins is cyanocobalamin.

Quality vitamins, on the other hand, will use the “coenzyme” forms of the B vitamins. These will often be listed with the word “coenzyme,” and the form of vitamin B12 will appear as either methylcobalamin or hydroxycobalamin. That’s a sure sign of a high-end, quality multivitamin…” [from Newstarget]