“Old People Need a Lot of Pills”… that’s was an observation my son made about his Granddad. And while that may be a bit of a crude way of making that observation, it is certainly a correct one.
The truth is that senior citizens often find themselves taking a vast array of pills and medications. Sometimes so many that it becomes hard to keep track of. And that’s why, so often, our aging parents have a pill dispenser kit to measure out the drugs for an entire week to try to keep it all straight.
Medicine Interaction
The real concern with that much medication being used at the same time is medicine interaction. If your elderly mom or dad takes five, six, seven or more pills at a time, it’s easy to imagine that one of those medications will get into conflict with another.
This is not an idle concern. Many drug related overdoes or interaction problems happen to senior citizens every day because they combined their prescription medications with over the counter drugs, or with alcohol, and the chemical reaction in their bodies became explosive.
And because you’re the caregiver to your aging mom or dad, it’s up to you to come up with some strict rules that you have to insist on for your mom or dad to assure that there is little possibility of a drug related reaction which could lead to hospitalization or death.
Knowledge is Power
When it comes to managing your elderly parent’s medications, knowledge is power. And the two key people you should turn to for that knowledge are your parent’s doctor and pharmacist. Sometimes the problems that arise from conflicting medicines come from having too many doctors prescribing drugs.
The solution is to be sure there is just ONE doctor who is in charge of your parent’s health in general. Have him or her review the current crop of medications, their frequency, and their ingredients to assure that there are no potentially dangerous interactions.
Pick ONE Pharmacist and Stick With Him/Her
Your pharmacist can perform the same function as your doctor, as he is trained to undersand how drugs work. So, as with the doctor, it’s good to pick just one pharmacist for all of your parent’s drugs, and schedule a time to go over the entire medication picture with the pharmacist to look for potential problems.
Avoid Potential Mistakes at Home
The next important area of focus to avoid potential medication mistakes is the home. There’s a lot you can do to prevent your aging parent from accidentally taking the wrong medications or the wrong dosages, either of which can cause potential problems. If the medicine cabinet where the meds are kept is full of similar looking bottles and the only way to tell them apart is fine print on the bottles, do your part to make them unique.
Multicolored Medication Bottles
You can buy multicolored bottles to transfer the drugs into. Then you can write out your parent’s medicine schedule in clear understandable terms like, “3 p.m. take 2 from the blue bottle, 1 from the pink bottle and 1 from the green bottle.” You can even take the next step of using a label maker to mark each bottle in clear, large print type so there is no possibility that what is in that bottle could be misunderstood.
Keep Track of Medicines
Take proper care to keep track of medicines and their expiration dates and stay ahead of reorder cycles. A great way to save money is to use online pharmacies or reorder services that can provide you with generic equivalent of prescription drugs. But, make sure the medication provider is legitimate so you know you are getting exactly what you ordered.
Stay on Top of It All
By staying on top of the medication situation, you are being the brains of the operation. Your retired mom or dad may no longer have that kind of attention to detail, and poor eyesight and mental fatigue can cause him or her to fail at staying on top of a complex drug situation.
So, it’s up to you fill in that gap. In doing so, you will have the peace of mind that they are getting the medications they need when they need them, and avoiding unnecessary problems.
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