Dr Brendan Beaton: What are multiple medicines? – Problems associated with multiple medicines
Listen to patients and health professionals speak about their experience with taking multiple medicines.
Dr Brendan Beaton
Main occupation: Haematology registrar/fellow
Years in clinical practice: 10
Qualifications: MBBS
Dr Brendan Beaton, haematologist, works with people who are very sick with leukaemia, lymphoma and other malignant diseases. He describes the side effects and other problems that the medicines to treat these conditions can cause for his patients.
For instance, what comes to mind is that I've worked a lot with bone marrow transplant patients and following the bone marrow transplant, patients are on a lot of different medications. Some of them are to suppress their immune system, so that they don't reject the transplant. Other medications are then to prevent infections, because they have a suppressed immune system. These medications, a lot of them, cause nausea, tremor or nausea, and I think that the number of tablets that patients take and the size of them, they can be quite big.
They have all sorts of problems with nausea. I mean, nausea can be … can be a symptom of other things that they're going through as well, but often people find it a real struggle. It's physically painful and nausea-inducing to have their medication. And they can often have a Pavlovian response, you know, they think about their medication and they start feeling sick. Then you start other medications to prevent the nausea or, um, if they have diarrhoea as a part of their condition, they’re on medication to help with diarrhoea.
Then they have pain for other reasons and they are on painkillers and there are all these interactions. So a lot of my time is spent looking at the medications that they're on, thinking about possible interactions, looking at their symptoms, how they're feeling and trying to dissect what medications might be doing and seeing if we can reduce one or eliminate it or find an alternative.
The Living with multiple medicines project was developed in
collaboration with Healthtalk Australia.