Lyn: Benefits and disadvantages – Symptom relief
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 has experienced significant pain relief because of her medicines, which has had a positive impact on all areas of her life.
OK. The best things. The major thing was pain relief. Nobody likes living with pain. You can't explain to people what it does to your life, but it does affect your everyday life, just normal things like getting dressed in the morning were a great effort, getting in the shower. If I hadn't had my husband at home, being so helpful, I would have had to have had help at some stage, because I wasn't coping physically. That also affects you mentally. So, being able to control the pain ... I mean, you can never get rid of it completely, but being able to control it to a level where you are able to live your everyday life the way you would like to is one of the major things I think for me, as far as pain relief is concerned. The Reynaud's was another thing. That's a very small thing, but it's very painful and, in the winter particularly, I was wearing gloves indoors. So having that medication has helped with that condition and I've been told that, if the Reynaud's gets worse, they can increase the medication dosage to help that, so that's been controlled.
The Living with multiple medicines project was developed in collaboration with Healthtalk Australia.