Helen: Messages to others – Think positively
Listen to patients and health professionals speak about their experience with taking multiple medicines.
Helen
Female
Age at interview: 58
Number of medicines: 10
Cultural background: Anglo-Australian
Helen encourages people to look at their medicines as being a help, rather than something to avoid, and to view them in the context of their whole life and other things they can do to ease their conditions.
I'd say managing your condition is a combination of things. That one of those things is taking medication of some kind. But another thing is looking at the way you live your life, and is there anything that you can change that might make it a little bit easier to live with whatever you have? But not to see medication as an enemy and something that you resist. To see it as something that is a helpful thing, and that one day, maybe you might not need as much as you have, if you make other changes in your life. But if that isn't the case, well it's actually a really positive thing. That we're lucky, we live in a country where we have access to this sort of thing that helps us live our life the best way we can.
The Living with multiple medicines project was developed in collaboration with Healthtalk Australia.