Brian: Taking complementary medicines – Different views regarding complementary medicines
Listen to patients and health professionals speak about their experience with taking multiple medicines.
Brian
Male
Age at interview: 75
Number of medicines: 16
Cultural background: Anglo/Irish-Australian
Brian’s wife encourages him to take fish oil. He is thinking about taking more complementary medicines, as they seemed to do his mother a lot of good.
[My wife] leaves out there for me a fish oil tablet, which I might take once a week when I remember to take it or it might be that my subconscious says, ‘Don't take it’, because it's unpleasant, but it's not. They've made them very pleasant. It might be an association of years ago when you took those awful fish oils and so on that were very unpleasant and I have that for the variety of reasons that you have it … for the Omegas, for the bones and so on. So I should really take it more.
There's that and there's ... I can't think of the brand names, but if I can just digress, my mother died this year and she was 98 years of age and she was a great one for taking vitamins and, if I can only remember the name ... but she took the garlic tablets and she took those in great style, and celery tablets. So I think I might start taking the vitamins, because I'd like to live to 98 as she did, because she had all her faculties.
The Living with multiple medicines project was developed in collaboration with Healthtalk Australia.