Sue: Taking complementary medicines – Evidence of effectiveness
Listen to patients and health professionals speak about their experience with taking multiple medicines.
Sue
Female
Age at interview: 65
Number of medicines: 16
Cultural background: Anglo-Australian
Sue feels that she has the kind of evidence she needs that complementary medicines are working for her.
Well for me the evidence is that I'm still pretty healthy and my LFT [liver function test] is pretty good—better than it should be given how long I've been diagnosed with the chronic condition that I've got. So, I feel like that's evidence. The GP that I go to I quite like his approach that he is scientific in the way that everything's based on the blood tests. When he introduces a medication or he changes a medication, he'll say now we'll only change this one and we'll see where you're at in three months’ time, see what the LFTs have done—if it's working fine or maybe you'll need more, maybe you'll need less. So he's looking … he's not just let's suck it and see, he's actually got some data that he can measure it against. I think that's a reasonable way of doing it.
The Living with multiple medicines project was developed in collaboration with Healthtalk Australia.