Aging and prescription pill misuse and abuse
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Drug addicts are made not born. Aside from children born of drug addicted mothers, who are sometimes born addicted, drug addiction is usually created by the initial decision to take an addictive drug, and to continue to take it until you can’t function without it. But sometimes the decision isn’t the addict’s.
At the other end of the Ages-of-Man spectrum, elderly people are becoming addicted to opioids – painkillers such as OxyContin, Vicodin and Percocet – and benzodiazepines – anti-anxiety drugs such as Xanax and Valium. Although they make up less than an eighth of the population, people age 65 and older consume a third of the prescription drugs in the country. The majority of that is prescribed, but the greater prescription leads to the greater abuse, because it leaves more room for abuse, accidental and intentional.
Some of it is because of careless prescriptions by their doctors. Sometimes it’s because they have multiple specialists, who don’t know all the prescriptions that the patient is already receiving, or the interactions between all the drugs. The patient may accidentally take the pills too often or too many pills at one time in an attempt to stop the pain.
It is a fine line between pain management and drug addiction sometimes. And poor pain management is a big complaint about the current healthcare system, which seems more concerned about getting someone hooked on an effective but addictive painkiller, even a dying patient, but at the same time prescribes highly addictive drugs like they were candy, leading to the opioid painkiller epidemic.
Maybe doctors are overworked. Maybe they are even underpaid, though health costs keep going up and it seems we spend less and less of time in a doctor’s visit actually interacting with the doctor. Maybe we just expect too much of them. We don’t expect or like to hear a doctor say they don’t know why we have certain symptoms or what to do about them.
The size of the aging population might be part of the problem, too. Maybe people living longer means more things are going wrong that never had time to go wrong before. Doctors who haven’t received specialized training in elder care now may have a lot of elderly patients. The elderly experience drugs differently. Their metabolisms are slower, the effects more keenly felt.
If the patient is even slightly mentally impaired, confused or even just hard of hearing, they may not understand or listen to instructions about proper dosages either. One pill three times a day might be interpreted as three pills once a day. Enough Xanax to cope with anxiety becomes a crippling dose that can make the patient fall down, possibly causing injury.
Then, too, there is actual drug abuse by the elderly, especially if they abused drugs earlier in life. Your doctor needs to know everything you’re taking, legal and illegal, to treat your health properly. Even a patient using only legal prescribed drugs may not remember all of them when asked. It’s a good idea to have a list ready.
If an elderly patient is addicted, there is treatment for them just as there is treatment for younger people, inpatient and outpatient. Click here to find out more.
