Polypharmacy & Medication Overload
Perform a “Brown Bag” Review of Your Meds
You walk into the doctor’s office. They ask for your medication list. You pull out a piece of paper with five, ten, maybe even fifteen prescriptions on it.
We call that polypharmacy. In my experience, it is one of the most dangerous problems in modern medicine. It is especially common among seniors.
Here is what usually happens. You take Drug A for a problem. It causes a side effect. So they give you Drug B to treat the side effect. Then they give you Drug C to treat a potential side effect from Drug B.
You see how this can snowball. It is a cascade.
Before you know it, you are taking a cocktail of chemicals that nobody actually tested together. That is the key point. When drugs are studied in the lab, they are usually tested in isolation. They are not tested in a combination of ten at once in the same person.
I saw a heartbreaking example of this. An elderly woman came to see me with a condition called Tardive Dyskinesia. Her face and body were making uncomfortable, jerky movements. It was terrifying her.
We looked at her medication list. She was on multiple prescriptions. At least two of them listed that exact condition as a side effect.
She was not sick. She was toxic.
We started peeling back the layers and removing the drugs one by one that she no longer needed. Her symptoms improved. One of the medications she had been on for over 20 years. Nobody was sure why she was prescribed it in the first place. I could not figure out any reason she was still taking it.
So here is what I suggest you do. Try what I call a “Brown Bag Review.” Put all your pill bottles in a bag. Take the actual bottles, not just a list, so there is no confusion. Bring them to your doctor and ask the hard question. “Do I still need all of these?”
Polypharmacy is one of the hidden dangers of modern medicine. Protect yourself by asking questions and reviewing your medications regularly.
One more thing. If you develop a new symptom around the time you start taking a new medication, it could be a drug side effect. Bring this up with your doctor right away.
Authored by Gerard Guillory, MD
Gerard Guillory, MD, is a board-certified internist who practiced for nearly four decades with a focus on functional, root-cause medicine. He is the author of three books on irritable bowel syndrome and the founder of It’s My Health, where he and his team put current health news in context and help members understand the underlying causes of chronic symptoms.
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