What Your Pharmacist Knows That Your Doctor Isn't Telling You

I have a cabinet that, if I am being honest, smells like a health food store and contains roughly a decade of good intentions. Bottles I bought because someone on social media told me to and supplements I started for a reason I can no longer remember. 

So I asked Phil Cowley, a pharmacist with 22 years of experience and one of the most followed health voices on TikTok, to join me on The Tamsen Show, and asked him to tell me the truth about all of it.

What he told me changed how I think about supplements completely. The problem is almost never that people are taking the wrong supplements, it’s that they are taking the right supplements for the wrong reasons, in the wrong order, or without understanding what they are actually trying to fix.

Here is what he says is actually worth your money, starting with the three supplements he believes every woman in midlife should be taking…

1. Magnesium Glycinate

If Phil could only recommend one supplement to start with, this might be it. About 50% of the population is slightly deficient in magnesium and most people have no idea. Every time you have an electrolyte drink with sodium in it, your body trades out magnesium to balance the charge. That trade affects your bones, your muscles, your brain, and your neurotransmitters.

The glycine part matters specifically. Glycine is a neurotransmitter that helps you settle down, calm and cool without making you drowsy. This is the magnesium combination Phil specifically recommends, not just any magnesium.

2. Vitamin D with K2

This one is about your bones, and Phil was very direct about why this matters more than most people realize. Fractures are what end lives. Bone density loss in women is not improving, it is getting worse, driven by a combination of diet, caffeine intake, and now GLP-1 medications which can also increase bone loss.

Vitamin D gets absorbed into your bloodstream, but K2 is what helps move it from your blood into your muscle and bone where it actually needs to go. Taking vitamin D without K2 means you may not be getting the full benefit for your bones specifically.

3. Creatine

This was the one that surprised me most. Creatine is not just a gym supplement. Women's creatine levels start declining around age 32, and men naturally have 20 to 30% more creatine than women throughout life. That means women are starting with smaller energy reserves to begin with.

Creatine is your body's backup battery system for ATP, which is the actual energy currency your cells run on. Phil explained it this way: anxiety is often a depletion of something, not an excess. If your brain is running on empty, it sends out alarm signals that feel like anxiety. Increasing creatine can directly improve brain energy levels, and for some people that alone reduces anxiety symptoms because the root cause was never anxiety to begin with, it was depletion.

Phil's exact words: “Those three, if you give them to anybody, their lives will feel better in two weeks.”

For hot flashes specifically

If you are looking for non-hormonal options, Phil's recommendations were magnesium glycinate first, black cohosh as a reasonable option though not highly effective on its own, and shatavari, an Indian herb that works further upstream in the hormonal cascade and can have a trickle-down effect.

For skin

Two things Phil specifically called out as worth the money.

Collagen with hyaluronic acid, taken either orally or topically or both. He was clear that collagen alone is just amino acids, and those amino acids do turn back into collagen once you are loading the right precursors, but hyaluronic acid is what actually helps rebuild the skin barrier. Collagen without it does much less.

L-arginine, an amino acid that increases nitric oxide production, which feeds the epithelial tissue throughout your skin. Phil's specific recommendation was pairing an over-the-counter retinol with oral L-arginine. Retinol increases cell turnover but does not address the epithelial tissue itself, so combining the two gives you a more complete result than retinol alone, and significantly cheaper than prescription options.

The thing I appreciated most about this conversation is that none of it required spending a lot of money. Phil was clear that the basics do not need to be expensive to work, and that the goal is not to add more to your cabinet. It is figuring out what you actually need and letting go of the rest.

I went home after this and did a full cabinet clean out. Half of what I had did not survive.

I put together a collection of the exact products Phil recommended so you do not have to go hunting for them. You can find it here.

Listen to The #1 Pharmacist: Creatine, Greens, Electrolytes, What's Worth Buying and What Isn't here or you can watch it here.

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