Micaela: Knowing about multiple medicines – Inadequate or conflicting information
Listen to patients and health professionals speak about their experience with taking multiple medicines.
Micaela
Female
Age at interview: 38
Number of medicines: 21
Cultural background: Anglo-Australian
Micaela was dissatisfied with the limited information her doctors offered before she commenced a new medicine. She is proactive about finding information, but sometimes does not know where to look and would like more help from her doctors.
I still wish that I had had more information from the outset about what I was getting into and not be fobbed off with, ‘Oh, my mother's been on…’, like, doctors have said to me, one doctor said to me, ‘Oh, don't worry. My mother's been on daily dose steroids ... oral steroid medication for 50 years and she's fine, oh, except that she has osteoporosis, diabetes, blah, blah’ ... as a result of the medication, most likely!
So I would have liked the doctors to be more up front at the beginning and, while I respect their knowledge and their qualifications and I know that the drugs have helped me in some ways, yeah, I just wish that I didn't have to dig so much for the information. Nobody really started investigating all the deficiencies I was suffering from until well into my illness ... or the continuation of my illness and I think that, given that it was my digestive tract that was compromised, I think it would have been ... well, of course, you know, I had an attack. Something needed to be ... you know, to allow information ... to just go and check ... obviously needs to be treated immediately, but at the same time, I would have appreciated if, earlier on, someone had said, ‘You should really look at ... it's quite likely that, you know, you're not taking enough zinc, because of all of these factors that I can see right now and it's quite likely, because your gut's compromised, so is your absorption of various vitamins and minerals’ and my uptake of protein is pretty poor as well and so I need to be aware of that and I just wish somebody had pointed me in that direction sooner.
While, of course, I take responsibility, it's my body and I take responsibility for ... I'm an adult and I'm also a questioning and articulate adult, so I know some of these pills I could and did explore on my own, but I wish that a professional had assisted me with that earlier on in the piece, that I didn't have to kind of find out some of these things by trial and error and ... because sometimes, you don't know where to dig.
The Living with multiple medicines project was developed in collaboration with Healthtalk Australia.