There’s a prominent medical myth that suggests we aren’t likely to suffer from deficiencies of essential nutrients such as magnesium. A recent book, “Money Is Not the Cure: Controversies in Health Care,” highlights mythical thinking among doctors.

A chapter entitled “Are Dietary Supplements Necessary?” seeks to dissuade the reader from using supplements. The author theorizes that doctors’ “disinterest” in supplements stems from rarely or never encountering a nutritional deficiency of any kind in their everyday practice.

It is certainly true that most physicians will not encounter a nutritional deficiency of any kind in their everyday practice — but not for the reason conventional doctors assert.

Here’s the real reason: If you don’t look for nutritional deficiencies, it’s easy to deny they exist. After all, it isn’t as though the signs of deficiency are spelled out on patients’ foreheads.

Like other doctors, I was not taught in medical school how to properly diagnose nutritional deficiencies. We learned only about life-threatening, deficiency-related diseases such as beriberi (severe lack of thiamine, also called vitamin B1).

But we learned nothing about mild-to-moderate cases of vitamin B1 deficiency — which can lead to depression, anxiety, physical weakness, and pain.

So it is true that conventional doctors are not seeing many cases of nutritional deficiencies, because they don’t know to look for them. Instead, doctors have been trained to use drugs to treat every complaint a patient comes in with.

Why is that? Because drugs are patentable substances that make a lot of money for the Big Pharma cartel. These companies have succeeded in convincing physicians and medical schools that drugs are the only tools for treating patients.

Furthermore, Big Pharma has brainwashed conventional medicine practitioners into believing that nutrient deficiencies are not the cause of any illness. I should know — that is what I was taught in medical school, and this is the message that continues to be promoted by conventional doctors.

When I started practicing medicine, I also felt that taking nutritional supplements was a waste of money. And that’s exactly what I told my patients.

More than 20 years later, I realize how distorted the teaching of medicine is and how wrong I was.

I base my current view on more than two decades of clinical experience, during which time I’ve been looking for and treating nutritional imbalances in my patients.