Persons aged 65 and older constitute approximately 13 percent of the U.S. population, but they take about one-third of all prescribed drugs. Nursing home residents typically take more. Statistically, if you take six different drugs, you have an 80 percent chance of at least one drug-drug interaction. There is no magic number of pills that constitutes poly- pharmacy, says geriatrician Samer Nasr, associate chief of staff for extended care at the Department of Veterans Affairs New Jersey Healthcare System in Lyons and East Orange. No advocates of reducing medications suggest that people just stop taking their prescribed medications or attempt to adjust their regimens themselves.
Proper adjustments require the efforts of a physician and pharmacist working together.
Recently, a man who appeared to be in his sixties came into Weinstein's pharmacy with a pill he'd been taking daily for several weeks. The man had no idea what it was or why he was taking it. His new physician, whose office is in the same building as the pharmacy, didn't recognize the pill, so he sent him downstairs to ask Weinstein what it was. It turned out to be an anti-diarrhea drug that the man no longer needed. According to Anderson, polypharmacy often happens when a patient sees more than one physician, each of whom prescribes medications that interact or overlap with those another physician has prescribed.