Lyn: Speaking with health professionals – Benefits of good communication
Listen to patients and health professionals speak about their experience with taking multiple medicines.
Lyn
Female
Age at interview: 67
Number of medicines: 1
Cultural background: British-Australian
Lyn was concerned that the treatment prescribed by one doctor did not align with the treatment she received regularly at a hospital outpatient clinic. Talking to the clinic and her specialists reassured her that she was doing the right thing.
Pain management has been a huge issue for me and I only have praise for the Pain Management Unit at [the hospital]. They're absolutely wonderful. They don't like people using morphine patches and I was told that when I went. However, when my pain was so severe that I was put onto the morphine patches, I rang the Pain Management Unit and I spoke to a doctor there and he said, ‘Look, if it's working, don't worry about it, you know. We're not going to treat you any differently because you are using it.’ I went to see my neurologist again, the one who had done the operation on my spine and said, 'Look, I've been prescribed this. Are you happy with my using it long term?’ She said, ‘Yes, I am, because the other alternative is to put something into your spine and that would mean that we could never operate again and I think, at some stage, we're going to need to’, so yeah, I'm happy. When I first started it, I felt a bit like a drug addict using morphine. I thought, ‘Oh, this is terrible!’ You know ... but now I see how much it's changed my life and I'm quite happy to go on using it.
The Living with multiple medicines project was developed in collaboration with Healthtalk Australia.