Niall: Benefits and disadvantages – What a high number of medicines signifies
Listen to patients and health professionals speak about their experience with taking multiple medicines.
Niall
Male
Age at interview: 45
Number of medicines: 7
Cultural background: British (Caucasian)
Niall feels he is dependent on a lot of medicines and, since he is still young, they remind him that there will be more medicines as he ages.
Working out what's the right thing to be taking. So those conversations with my clinicians about my condition and what my options are. I mean, looking at it, five a day and, as I said, a number of these, that’s nine … I'll take twelve tablets a morning. That's a lot. Sometimes, it does feel a lot.
When it was just a couple … the Lexapro, a couple of metformin and the statin and then add the fish oil to that, that was ... yeah, that was alright. Adding another two medications and particularly with the metformin format, where I have to take four of them a day, you look at the little vial of medications and go ‘Mmmm’. Again, it's that psychological adjustment to being dependent on medication. I will be dependent on this stuff probably for the rest of my life. Every day, for the rest of my life, this is going to be the minimum ... minimum.
There will inevitably be further age-related deterioration, even if I do try and look after myself. There will inevitably be some changes and that may well lead to more medications. Joy! Not something I particularly want to look forward to, but that may be the case. I'm not terribly enamoured of being dependent on so many medications, but I need to be.
The Living with multiple medicines project was developed in collaboration with Healthtalk Australia.