On 5/1/2014 9:22 AM, Dave Smith wrote:
> On 2014-05-01 9:04 AM, jmcquown wrote:
>
>> One name jumped right out at me (he was not the number 1 guy). He was,
>> for a while, my mother's primary care physician. He had her taking so
>> many pills I had to buy a pill container to dole out which ones she was
>> supposed to take (morning, noon, night). It was ridiculous. It got to
>> the point where she was ditching her pills. She started cancelling
>> appointments because she didn't want yet another prescription.
>
> It can be difficult to keep track of medications. It doesn't help that
> when you are ill enough to need a lot of medication you are often a
> little dopey and confused. Before I was discharged from the hospital
> after heart surgery I had a meeting with the pharmacist about all the
> medications I was on, and there were a few. Some of them were once a
> day, twice a day, three times a day. I had taking something one for
> blood pressure, one for cholesterol, one for arrhythmia, warfarin
> tablets and injections, pain killers, iron pills and.... thanks to the
> medication, stool softeners. Due to the procedure I had been through,
> and the pain medication I was pretty dozy.
>
> My wife went over to the pharmacy to get the medications. We got the
> generic stuff, so we had a heck of a time matching the various pills to
> the list I had been given. The pill organizer was a godsend.
>
>
>
>>
>> I found her a geriatric specialist who <gasp!> made house calls. He
>> took blood and urine samples, did lab work. The result? She really
>> only needed *four* of the prescriptions, not the handful of pills she'd
>> been taking every day, three times a day. Whew!
>>
>> Over-medicating seems to be a big problem, especially with the elderly.
>
> Some people like to be medicated. They think they are getting what they
> paid for when they went to the doctor. I got myself off most of mine,
> and my wife was upset, insisting that I should be taking my medicines.
> The first I stopped was the pain medication. As soon as my heart rate
> was stabilized I got rid of that one, with my doctor's approval. Since
> my heart rate was fine I did not have to take the warfarin, That stuff
> is so dangerous that I had to have blood tests first thing every Monday
> morning. I had lost some weight and once I got back into my exercise
> program my blood pressure was low enough I did not have to take that.
> Within a few months I was taking only the cholesterol medication.
>
>
I have a self-made business card with my medications and frequencies
printed on the back. I also use a pill organizer with 4 daily
compartments that I fill up each Sunday night. In case of accidents, it
is well to have a complete description of generic medicines since they
seem often to be white round pills that differ only in a code impressed
on them.

--
Jim Silverton (Potomac, MD)

Extraneous "not." in Reply To.