Dad ordered hearing drops online. Here's how we checked them against his pill list
I found out about the hearing drops the way you find out about most things your parents do online: a box on the porch. Dad had seen an ad for Audifort, a liquid hearing supplement, read the whole sales page, and ordered the three-bottle pack. $207. He was a little defensive about it.
I was annoyed for about five minutes. Then I remembered he's a grown man who managed survey crews for forty years, and that being annoyed wasn't going to help. What would help was checking two things: whether the seller was real, and whether anything in the bottle would fight with his prescriptions. This is how we went about it, in case your parent's porch gets a box too.
He's in good company
My first instinct was that he'd been suckered. The numbers say he's just ordinary.
Share of adults in national surveys. Natural products means supplements other than vitamins and minerals, such as herbs.
| Type | Adults who take it |
|---|---|
| At least one dietary supplement (2011 to 2012) | 52% |
| A multivitamin or multimineral (2011 to 2012) | 31% |
| A natural product such as an herb (2012) | almost 18% |
Source: NCCIH, Using Dietary Supplements Wisely, citing NHANES 2011 to 2012 and the 2012 National Health Interview Survey.
The NCCIH's guide to using supplements wisely reports that about half of American adults take at least one supplement. The same page also says what I needed to hear: supplements can interact with medicines, so tell your doctors and pharmacist what you take. That became our plan.
Check one: is the seller real?
I went through the receipt and the order page with him at the kitchen table.
| What I checked | What we found |
|---|---|
| Who charged his card | ClickBank, the retailer that runs the checkout |
| One-time charge or subscription | One-time, no monthly plan |
| Price matched the official page | Yes, $69 a bottle on the 3-bottle pack |
| Refund policy in writing | Yes, 90 days from the order date |
| Contact information | Email and a phone number on the site, plus a returns address |
That was reassuring. This wasn't a mystery website with a free-trial trap. If you want the longer version of that check, someone did a careful job on whether the company behind Audifort is legit, including the checkout and the company details. It matched what we saw.
Check two: the pill list
This is where it got real. Dad takes warfarin for atrial fibrillation, lisinopril for blood pressure, and metformin for blood sugar. I laid the Audifort label next to his list and marked anything that a government fact sheet or study connects to those drugs.
| Dad's medicine | Ingredients on the label to ask about | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Warfarin (blood thinner) | Panax ginseng | In a controlled trial, American ginseng weakened warfarin's effect in healthy volunteers. Panax is a related species |
| Lisinopril (blood pressure) | Monoammonium glycyrrhizinate, a licorice compound | The NCCIH licorice fact sheet warns that even small amounts of glycyrrhizin have been linked to severe effects in people with high blood pressure |
| Metformin (blood sugar) | Gymnema, Panax ginseng, chromium | All three are taken for blood sugar, so they could add to the medicine's effect |
The amounts are small. The label lists 22 ingredients sharing a 200 mg blend, so there's not much of any one thing in a dropper. But warfarin is a drug where small changes matter, and nobody could tell me how much ginseng was in there because the label doesn't say.
A clear rundown of Audifort's side effects and drug interactions flags the same groups of medicines, which made me feel better that I wasn't inventing problems.
What the pharmacist said
We did a brown-bag check: all his prescriptions and the Audifort bottle in a bag, carried to the pharmacy counter. The pharmacist looked at the label for a good while and said the licorice compound and the blood sugar ingredients were probably fine in those amounts with his other medicines, but that adding anything with ginseng while on warfarin was a question for his anticoagulation clinic, not for her.
The clinic's answer was simple. His warfarin dose had only just settled after a hospital stay, and they didn't want him adding any new supplement for now. Not because of anything special about this product. Because they didn't want any new variables while his blood tests were finally steady.
Using the refund
So we used the refund, which turned out to be a good test of the policy. The bottles were unopened.
- I emailed support the next morning, within a week of the order, and got a return authorization number the same day.
- We wrote the number on the box and mailed it to the returns address in Florida, with tracking. Postage was on us.
- I emailed the tracking number back.
- The refund showed up on his card about two weeks after the box was delivered.
The 3-bottle pack ships free, so there was no shipping charge to lose. Whatever else you think of a product, a refund that works as written counts for a lot with me.
Why I didn't just say no
It would have been easy to tell him supplements are a waste of money and box it up myself. I didn't, for two reasons. First, it was his money and his ears, and he'd read more about the product than I had. Taking the decision away from him would have taught him to stop telling me what he orders, which is the worst possible outcome with a man on warfarin.
Second, he wasn't wrong to want to do something. His hearing had been slipping for years, he'd had a scare in one ear, and he was trying to look after himself. The useful thing I could do was make sure his doctors knew and that the money came back if the answer was no. That's a better deal than an argument.
If your parent isn't on a blood thinner or a pile of other prescriptions, the pharmacist's answer may well be a simple yes. Ours just wasn't, this time, and that had more to do with his warfarin than with anything on the label.
What we'd tell another family
- Don't scold. Ask to look at it together.
- Check the seller: receipt, subscription, refund terms.
- Take the label and the medicine list to the pharmacist before the first dose.
- If your parent is on a blood thinner, the clinic that manages it gets the final say on any new supplement.
- If it's a no, use the refund promptly and keep the tracking number.
Dad grumbled for a day. Then he said it was the most thorough anybody had checked anything for him since his last land survey, which I'm choosing to take as a compliment. If his warfarin clinic ever gives the go-ahead, we'll look at it again together.