Managing Those Pesky Meds
One of my greatest joys is when I have the opportunity to meet family caregivers in person. Usually it is when I speak at events, but often it’s in the comfort of someone’s home. The subject that continually comes up is concern about making sure that loved ones take their medications on time and correctly, even if they live across the country away from the family caregiver. The reasons for their concerns are actually borne out of statistics. Older women consume 60 percent of all prescription and over-the-counter medications; the number of prescriptions written for older adults averages 15 per person per year; and 83 percent of people over 65 are taking prescription medications. With 15 medications to take on a regular basis, accidental overdosing or even misdosing would be a problem for anyone; but for many of our loved ones, the risks are increased by memory loss, hearing difficulties, low vision and simply an inability to figure it all out.
Caregiver Medication Compliance Tips:
- Find out how foods, vitamins, aspirin and supplements can affect the medications your loved one is taking. You can do this by checking with the primary care physician or the pharmacist.
- Use a pill bottle or electronic pill organizer and organize the medications by day, preferably at least a week in advance.
- Make sure your loved one takes medications exactly as directed by their doctor. Make sure that they don’t stop prematurely or change the timing or dosage without consulting their physician.
- Make sure that your loved one knows never to take any medication prescribed for someone else.
- Regularly check the medicine chest and refrigerator for medication usage patterns, expiration dates, and to ensure timely refills.
I have heard horror stories over the years. I met a woman once who was about 80 years old and she diagnosed her husband as having depression. She had battled with her own bouts of depression and thought she knew all the symptoms. So she began giving her husband her depression medication. The medication that she was on was not in compliance with his other medications and he ended up in the hospital with horrible side effects. Never, ever share medications.
Another woman told me the story of how a hired caregiver had taken her husband’s blood pressure one day and it was low. So she single-handedly made the decision to withhold his blood pressure medication thinking it was going to lower the patient’s blood pressure even further. The patient’s pulse was rising rapidly and it got so high that he had a stroke. The cardiac medicine that had been prescribed was for the pulse purpose, not just for blood pressure. This is an extreme case, but these types of situations happen often and the consequences are huge.
Mistakes like this are made everyday due to the rise in polypharmacy prescribed by numerous doctors treating the same patient. There are also numerous stories about people creating elaborate systems to manage a loved one’s medications, but when it comes to taking their own medications, many are holding back on pills, cutting them in half to save money or not refilling prescriptions due to cost.
Medications need to be taken carefully and with as much awareness as is possible to understand risks as well as benefits. Self-medicating is dangerous, but so is under-medicating, for you or your loved one.
As in everything else having to do with caregiving, successful medication management works best when you work as a team and that includes checking with the doctor before doing anything that is not prescribed.
