Why Are Older People Taking as Many as 30 Big Pharma Drugs?

Seniors represent only 13% of the population, but they take over 40% of pharmaceutical drugs in the US. In the UK, 45% of prescriptions are doled out to individuals over the age of 65 years. The practice of polypharmacy has never been more acute than it is in the modern era. So why are we drugging the elderly so profoundly?

With such a high number of the elderly taking multiple drugs, there have been few studies looking at how these drugs interact with one another. This is even more alarming in those over 65 because an older person metabolizes chemicals differently, with the chances of an adverse reaction to any one prescription drug rising to a reported 20%, compared with just a 3% risk in a healthy younger person...

So just how badly are we drugging the elderly, and why? It isn’t just pain medications or high blood pressure medications that are keeping our seniors overly-drugged. In a recent study that looked at over 100,000 doctor’s visits among those over 65 years of age, doctors alarmingly prescribed psychotropic drugs almost twice as often as they do for younger patients. Psychiatric drugs for depression, anxiety, and other mental health conditions were prescribed to elderly patients, when arguably, they often could have just used a few sessions of counseling, or a visit from friends and family in their extended care or nursing homes...