The Doctor is In.

Doctors are bought in to dietary supplements.

According to an NBJ survey conducted in late 2023, a significant majority of MDs take and recommend dietary supplements—though that buy-in is exaggerated because we recruited survey respondents via supplement companies for the survey. NBJ partnered with five leading practitioner brands and Holistic Primary Care magazine to understand practitioners’ beliefs and behaviors around supplements.

Still, MDs are delivering over $1 billion in dietary supplement sales and represent the largest and fastest-growing share of the practitioner channel. It’s clear that doctors believe in supplements, and supplement brands would be wise to listen to their preferences.

Our survey of nearly 2,000 practitioners across disciplines, over 200 of whom were MDs, was part of NBJ's latest Practitioner Report, which also examines the practitioner channel by way of market sizing and consumer research. The report is timely because we’re predicting the practitioner channel, which is growing second only to e-commerce, will account for more than 10% of the supplement market by 2026.

The recipe for this growth consists of trust and convenience. Practitioners trust quality brands, science-backed formulations, branded ingredients and brand-led education programs, and patients trust their practitioners, as a significant number of them report buying (and rebuying) the supplements their practitioners recommend.

Convenience comes with the double-edged sword of digitization. Both patient visits and product dispensing are increasingly happening online. In the survey, nearly a third of doctors are seeing 40% or more of their patients via tele-consults, and nearly two-thirds are selling through a gated online dispensary or order-fulfillment tool that offers a cut to the practitioner.

These affinities are good news for a channel losing its exclusivity to ungated sites like Amazon, a conundrum for the channel and the other cut of the sword. Nearly every top practitioner brand now sells on Amazon, which puts the trust held by these practitioners at risk. More than half of surveyed practitioners claim supplement sales to be “essential” or “very important” to their business, and a quarter rank “practitioner exclusivity” as a top driver for brand selection.

The doctors have bought into the product. Practitioner channel success may depend on maintaining their buy-in to the business.