Diana: Benefits and disadvantages – Complicated medication regimens and confusion
Listen to patients and health professionals speak about their experience with taking multiple medicines.
Diana
Female
Age at interview: 22
Number of medicines: 13
Cultural background: Anglo-Australian
Diana is not confident her medicines are working sufficiently to treat her health problems. She feels that some doctors are dismissive of her when she tries to raise this with them.
The fact that I will go into doctors to try and get a script and be just told, you're drug seeking or we can't give you this that'll help, because you're already on these other ones which are not helping. It really gets hard when you go in and listing your medications and go, I don't feel right, something's not right, or I'm not healing, I've got no energy, and they just go, go and lose weight. It's like, well okay; let's look at the methods of this. How about we try looking at it from a different point of view?
It can really help to just step back and just think about it a bit. But it hurts when you fork out all this money and just get told, well you've got this but I can't treat you, or, I'll give you a diagnosis over the phone, come back in six months, when you're pretty much on death's door as it is. But it gets really difficult.
The Living with multiple medicines project was developed in collaboration with Healthtalk Australia.