Micaela: Problems with multiple medicines (I) – Side effects (2)
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 sometimes finds it difficult to tell which are side effects of her medicines and which are symptoms of her conditions.
When you're on so many things, it starts getting quite confusing. What's the side effect, what's actually part of Crohn's disease, for example, because apparently it's quite common for people with Crohn's to have joint problems and hip problems and things. So, the same sort of things that you see as a side effect of the steroids could actually be a factor of your Crohn's too and those sort of things can happen actually when your Crohn's appears to be dormant and when your inflammatory markers are all down and all those anti-nucleic factors that indicate that your immune system is attacking things it shouldn't. They might actually be quite low, so it's hard to tell ... I find it now very hard to tell what's side effect and what's not. And I've developed other conditions and it's quite likely that that is because of my medication. So I've got costochondritis now, which I didn't have before.
The Living with multiple medicines project was developed in collaboration with Healthtalk Australia.