Member-only story
Polypharmacy: The Drug ‘Scam’ We All Helped Create
From middle-age onward, millions of adults fall into a “prescribing cascade” of way too many meds. Doctors know it. But only you can stop it.
If we could finger a single culprit for the gross overprescription of drugs aimed especially at older people, we’d call it a colossal scam.
But we’ve all helped create polypharmacy, whereby people take way too many medications, and often the wrong meds, leading to serious physical and mental health outcomes that shouldn’t happen. Hundreds of millions of people around the globe pop billions of dollars worth of prescription pills (not to mention over-the-counter meds and supplements) they no longer need and maybe never needed in the first place, often with counterproductive and even deadly results.
In England, as one example, the prescription of multiple meds is common by age 50 and grows alarmingly more common later in life.
“By age 50 years, approximately 15% of the population had been dispensed five or more medications within a 3-month period, increasing to 42% by age 70 years,” researchers conclude in a new study in the journal Nature Health. “At 70 years of age, approximately 12% were dispensed ten or more medications within a 3-month period.”
