By: LISA R. WILSON

If you know or are close to an elderly man or woman, chances are you have seen them pop a pill before or after dining, heard them mention that their medication costs are too high, and/or have seen their bathroom or kitchen cabinets overflowing with small, orange prescription bottles.

Polypharmacy (the use of multiple meds) is most common among people over age 65, about one-fifth of whom take at least 10 medications a week. Although multiple medications can treat or ease many ailments, overmedication can worsen some conditions and cause troubling side effects that need to be treated with even more drugs. This overmedication among older Americans is developing into a vicious cycle and a growing, unexamined problem in modern-day health care. “Overmedication is a true medical epidemic,” says Armon B. Neel Jr., PharmD, a clinical pharmacist in Georgia. “It’s completely out of hand.”

The Institute of Medicine estimates that at least 1.5 million drug overdoses occur in the U.S. every year, thousands of which are fatal. Studies indicate that about one-third of these adverse drug reactions occur among senior citizens—and that 42% of these fatal accidents were caused by a lethal combination of drugs. Sadly, when elderly patients first start to recognize signs of a possible adverse reaction to their overmedication; e.g. memory lapse, fatigue, abdominal pain, swelling, or other ailments, doctors often mistake these physical responses as signs of a worsening disease…and prescribe more drugs to combat the symptoms. This can lead to a “prescribing cascade,” says Jeffrey Delafuente, FCCP, a professor of pharmacy at Virginia Commonwealth University. “The solution is to perform a proper diagnosis and reduce the number of drugs. Adding more just exacerbates the problem.”

Improper treatment of a patient by a physician is the leading cause of medical malpractice. There can be a variety of circumstances in which a patient is misdiagnosed and subjected to improper treatment and preventable procedures—such as wrong limb amputation, wrong organ operation/transplant, inappropriate administration of chemotherapy, and excessive medication prescriptions.

If you believe you or a loved has suffered from medical malpractice of any kind, including being overly-medicated, or if you have lost a loved one due to wrongful death from medical malpractice, contact a qualified medical malpractice attorney in your area today for more information or to discuss the specifics of your case.