How many prescription medications are you taking? How many over-the-counter herbal medications or other nutritional supplements? The alarming results of a new study on the combinations of medications taken by American seniors indicate that it’s best to be cautious about taking certain prescription and over-the-counter medications in tandem.

According to the report—which reviewed the medications taken by 3,000 men and women aged between 57 and 85—at least two million older Americans might be taking a potentially dangerous combination of prescription or over-the-counter medications. And up to one in ten older men might be taking a combination of drugs which could be potentially harmful.

Another factor affecting seniors is the fact that older people tend to take more medications overall, including both prescription and over-the-counter preparations. In the 57 to 85 age group, 91% of people take at least one medication, and more than half use five or more medications, including prescription and over-the-counter drugs.

The consequences of drug combinations aren’t always dangerous, but for older people, the side effects and interactions of drugs and over-the-counter medications are often more hazardous, due to the way metabolism changes as we age.

An example of a potentially serious drug interaction is that between warfarin, which is used to dissolve blood clots, and aspirin, which has a similar blood-thinning effect. The risk of internal bleeding can become dangerously high when both drugs are taken together. The combination of warfarin and garlic can also have a similar effect.

Other potentially dangerous combinations include:

• Aspirin and gingko biloba, taken together, can increase the risk of excessive bleeding.
• Taking Lisinopril (prescribed for blood pressure), along with potassium supplements (which may be prescribed because some blood pressure drugs reduce potassium levels), can cause abnormal heart rhythms.
• Over-the-counter niacin supplements can be dangerous when taken with statins (prescribed for managing cholesterol levels), due to an increased potential for muscle damage.

Experts say it’s best to be cautious when it comes to over-the-counter medications – don’t take them without the ok from your doctor, and make sure you ask about side effects and drug interactions every time your doctor prescribes a new medication.

photo credit: Nils Geylen

Many of us are predisposed towards a mistrust of drug companies. The fact is, they make billions of dollars every year, and it seems like most would do anything for a buck. Recent news that AstraZeneca allegedly suppressed negative information about Seroquel, an anti-psychotic drug, is not helping the tarnished image that the pharmaceutical industry has earned.

A Washington Post article published recently outlines the study, known as “Study 15,” and reported that AstraZeneca had suppressed the study’s negative results, and at the same time promoted more positive results from other studies with less stringent protocols.

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One of the great ironies of the insurance system is that when you’re sick and need the protection of health insurance the most, you can expect to pay a lot more for your premiums. It’s practically one of the certainties of life, like death and taxes, that are invariably true for everyone. But is that about to change?

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President-elect Barack Obama should take note – health reform is about the little things just as much as it is sweeping changes to the system.

Information gathered from a batch of more than 8,500 meetings held around the country in December will be compiled and used to help design the healthcare proposal that has been in the news as of late. Obama’s transition team plans to post some of the material at change.gov.

One particular meeting took place late December 2008, between newly appointed secretary of health and human services, the former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, and more than two dozen seniors During this meeting, seniors told Daschle that they placed more importance on certain things such as waiting times to see their doctor, the increasing cost of prescription drugs, and the narrow range of Medicare coverage for certain medical procedures, equipment, and treatments.

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It’s not just the unemployed facing healthcare insurance problems, according to a new Robert Wood Johnson Foundation report compiling research carried out by the State Health Access Data Assistance Center at the University of Minnesota. Nearly 20% of American workers have no health insurance, up from around 14% in the mid-1990s.

During the mid-1990s, one in seven American workers had no insurance. Just ten years later, that figure has increased to one in five workers uninsured, or around six-million more people over the mid-1990s total.

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Fibromyalgia is a devastating disease that causes chronic pain and other symptoms for those who are affected – but it’s a disease with no known cause and no standard treatment. Many people haven’t even heard of the condition, but if that’s the case it’s not because the drug industry isn’t trying hard enough.

Drug Companies’ Hundreds of Millions Help Raise Awareness of Fibromyalgia

Last year, drug industry giants Pfizer and Eli Lilly spent hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising to “raise awareness” of fibromyalgia. The companies donated more than six million dollars to non-profit organizations for educational campaigns and medical conferences, too.

That’s more than the companies donated for Alzheimer’s, and diabetes. And only donations made for cancer, depression, and AIDS were higher than the donations made to further the cause of fibromyalgia.

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When a doctor explains treatment options to a patient, it’s often little understood; frequently glossed over; and delivered in over-technical terms. A new movement in health care is makings strides to change the status quo, and with it the decisions of a whole new group of patients.

Case Examples of Informed Consent Opportunities

Currently, the most effective early warning signal for prostate cancer is an elevated level of prostate-specific antigen in the blood. But that test is nowhere near perfect – many men with prostate cancer test negative for PSA, and men who are overweight and have developed prostate cancer often have reduced PSA levels. Up to 25% of men with prostate cancer test negative for elevated PSA.

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The $787 billion economic stimulus package that was signed into law last week includes one or two health-related measures that haven’t been widely publicized, but which are no less important for it.

One of these is the $1.1 billion that has been assigned for a study to compare the effectiveness of a large number of medical treatments, drugs, surgeries, and other current standard medical procedures and devices. A council of fifteen federal employees will be set up to coordinate the research and advise the President and Congress on where the money would best be spent.

The program is a response to growing concerns that doctors have little solid evidence on which to base the value of many of the treatments that are currently considered standard.

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Japan’s overcrowded, understaffed hospitals are in danger – and so are the people who rely on those hospitals when they need emergency medical care. An elderly Japanese man who sustained head injuries after being struck by a motorcycle waited ninety minutes in an ambulance – while paramedics phoned fourteen different Tokyo hospitals, trying to find a hospital that would accept the man for treatment. All the hospitals refused to admit the injured man, saying they lacked the equipment and staff needed to treat him. The paramedics arrived at the accident site just a few minutes after the 69-year-old man was injured, but ninety minutes and fourteen hospitals later, the man died just a short time after paramedics finally located a hospital that would accept him for treatment. The man died from the shock caused by the loss of a large amount of blood – a condition which the man might have survived if he had received treatment earlier.

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The big healthcare news from the Obama administration over the last few weeks has been that the State Child’s Health Insurance Program will be expanded, but another SCHIP-related change that happened around the same time hasn’t received as much attention.

This change is a reversal of enrollment rules imposed in August 2007 by the Bush administration. Controversial at the time, the new rules made it much more difficult for states to allow certain families to use SCHIP. For families whose income totaled more than 250% of the federal poverty line (that equates to around $50,000 per year for a family of four), it suddenly became all but impossible to use SCHIP. Several states actually sued the federal government over this change, including Maryland, Illinois and Washington.

In May 2008, Bush relented a little by reducing the income restriction to around 200% of the federal poverty line, or about $40,000 per year for a family of four.

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