IS IT SAFE TO TAKE FISH OILS AND BLOOD THINNERS? AND IS IT A GOOD IDEA TO TAKE FISH OILS IN THE FIRST PLACE?

It can be tricky when you want to take positive steps for your health but you’re unsure of how these will interact with prescribed medication.

This is especially true if you’re taking prescribed blood thinners. They interact with everything!

But does that mean that everything you want to do or take is dangerous?

Here’s the thing: blood clotting is a complex process with lots of different biochemicals mutually regulating, turning up and down other processes. It’s a whole can of worms.

And pretty much every change you make will effect it. Changing your regular bed time, your diet, your exercise levels, and of course supplements and herbs will all mess with this system in unpredictable ways.

So, with this in mind, you could see this as an indication that it’s dangerous to make healthy changes to improve your health.

But there’s another option. When people are prescribed blood thinners, their clotting is monitored with a test called an INR, which can help dial in the appropriate dose. So, working with your doctor, you could gradually adjust your lifestyle in healthy ways and then make sure your INR is monitored so that your prescription is also adjusted accordingly.

But there’s another question here, the one that wasn’t asked. Why take fish oils in the first place?

Fish oils are recommended by pretty much anyone in the wellness space as something healthy for pretty much anyone with any problem to take.

But I’m not entirely convinced that taking them as standard is part of a healthy lifestyle.

Sure, they turn down a lot of types of inflammation.

But they don’t address what’s causing the inflammation in the first place.

More importantly, we need to remember that inflammation is a process of communication. And a lot of people don’t have enough inflammation.

So could fish oils make some people’s health worse? I wonder . . .

This is another example of the beauty of having a process. By focusing on process over a tool we have a framework for selecting the right things at the right time, a way of assessing if they’re helping and we know when to stop using, which is as important as knowing what to do in the first place.