Karen: The costs of taking multiple medicines – ‘Doing without’ to afford medicines
Listen to patients and health professionals speak about their experience with taking multiple medicines.
Karen
Female
Age at interview: 37
Number of medicines: 8
Cultural background: Anglo-Australian
Karen decided to do all she could to reduce pain and heal in the first year following her injury, despite needing to incur debt to do so. She needed to revise this when she found herself in significant debt due to her medical expenses.
I was doing acupuncture until last Easter. I was doing that weekly and that helped quite a bit, but last Easter … so it was about 18 months, well, not quite 18 months after the surgery and I had another big flare-up where I ended up off work for another month and the local emergency again, because I had spasms that I just ended up lying on the kitchen floor and couldn't get up. In the 12 months after the surgery, everything I've read and everyone's told me is, ‘You'll get the most improvement in the first 12 months.’ So it was, ‘Bugger the cost! I'll deal with the debt later. I'll do whatever I can to just get me as well as I possibly can in that first 12 months.’
But Easter last year, I reached the point, ‘Well, no! This is a chronic thing that's going to continue and I can't keep living like this.’ I need to actually live within my means, so acupuncture had to go, but I'm hoping to start it up again soon, because I stopped doing the acupuncture ... money was the only thing. Well, acupuncture is just reducing the painkillers. The painkillers are cheaper than the acupuncture, so I guess I'll just have to let the acupuncture go.
The Living with multiple medicines project was developed in collaboration with Healthtalk Australia.