Sue: Taking complementary medicines – The effort of taking complementary medicines
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 can imagine a time when it will be difficult for her to take her complementary medicines and will need a high level of support to help manage them.
One of the complications or whatever, drawbacks I suppose, of complementary medication is that you can't just say to the chemist make these up for me because they're not necessarily all chemist goods. Some of them come from health-food shops and so on. So hence, I'm dispensing them myself. I’d imagine … certainly when … my mother died three years ago and in the last years of her life she had a number of medications to take as people tend to. But they were all things that were … that could be made up by the chemist and would come in the blister packs and you could just get them out for her and there was your breakfast dose ready to go, that's probably the highest level of support. It’s hard to do that with the complementary things.
The Living with multiple medicines project was developed in collaboration with Healthtalk Australia.