The big risk you take when you pop multiple drugs

New research: Are your meds making you worse than ever?

It’s called “therapeutic competition.”

But put simply, it means when you’re taking more than one drug, the results can be a crap shoot.

One med might cancel out the effect of another. Or, taking a drug for one condition, might make another illness worse.

It looks like millions of us are taking part in an uncontrolled experiment. Popping multiple pills every single day that have never been tested together.

Because if they were, we would be petrified by the results.

Researchers at Yale and Oregon Health & Science University recently did something that you probably thought had been done already.

By the FDA.

They took a look at what can happen when multiple drugs are used by the same person.

And they discovered something that most doctors are clueless about.

I’m not talking about well-known drug interactions. The kind that computerized pharmacies are supposed to alert us to when we fill an Rx.

This is different.

It’s about what these researchers called the danger in treating conditions “one at a time.”

You know, the cardiologist might give you a drug to treat high blood pressure. Then your arthritis is acting up and your rheumatologist has a pill for that.

While that combo won’t set off any red flags when you fill the Rx at your pharmacy, that blood pressure med could be making your arthritis much worse. And of course that can mean taking even more pills.

The researchers found numerous conditions where this can happen, like high blood pressure, diabetes and A-fib.

Study co-author Jonathan Lorgunpai from Yale said, “More than 9 million older adults in the U.S. are being prescribed medications that may be causing them more harm than benefit.”

Some of the conditions these researchers found that “compete” with each other — where a drug taken for one problem can make another condition even more severe — include:

• Drugs for high blood pressure that can make arthritis, diabetes, COPD and depression worse.
• Drugs to treat diabetes that can worsen heart disease (including irregular heart rhythms), osteoporosis and depression.
• Drugs taken for A-fib that can intensify osteoporosis, depression and dementia.

Along with worsening certain conditions, the study found that the more drugs you take, the more you up your chance of taking a fall, and becoming confused and dizzy.

“Right now we’re probably treating too many conditions with too many medications,” said Professor David Lee at the Oregon State University College of Pharmacy.

Of the almost 6,000 people the researchers looked at, they found that over 20 percent of them were in this kind of drug trap.

One of the problems is that “drugs tend to focus on one disease at a time,” said Dr. Lee. He also said that while many doctors are aware of this, they’re not sure what to do about it.

And so they usually end up not doing anything.

In fact, the researchers found that even when doctors knew full well about these “competing conditions,” in only 16 percent of the cases was the patient’s treatment even changed!

Dr. Lee’s said that doctors should “just focus on the most serious health problem,” instead of using “a drug to treat a different condition that could make the more serious health problem even worse.”

If you’re taking multiple meds every day, it’s time to talk to your doctor about how to get off of them — or at the very least, to take as few as possible.

Sources:
“One in five older Americans take medications that work against each other” Oregon State University News & Research Communications, oregonstate.edu