As the population ages and Baby Boomers slide into senior status, misuse of prescription drugs is becoming more and more of a problem. As new drugs are developed to treat the usual problems of aging, older patients can find themselves with an entire pharmacopia to deal with. The issue is compounded by the increase in medical specialization, which means a patient may be seeing—and getting prescriptions from—many different practitioners, most of whom don’t communicate with each other. The result, far too often, is over-medication and sometimes addiction.
Most commonly, people become addicted to pain medications such as Vicodin and OxyContin . If they take the prescribed dosage and the pain persists, it’s easy for them to think they should take another. Elderly patients may also forget that they’ve already taken a dose, a problem that increases as the drug affects their mental abilities.
Treatment for older patients who have become addicted to medications prescribed for them should not follow the same protocols as treatment of those who became addicts through recreational use of drugs. While some principles of twelve-step programs can be useful, they tend to focus on psychological and emotional pain rather than physical pain.
Holistic prescription drug addiction treatment can offer patients ways to cope with their ailments without overdosing on painkillers. There...
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