Is Your Medication Making you Sick?
Most of us have some understanding that there are medications that aren’t going to agree with us. For instance, we have this vague understanding that if we take too much aspirin we may end up with stomach problems. We know that there are allergic reactions to antibiotics because whenever you are prescribed one or one of your kids were prescribed something the first question is do you have any known allergies to this medication.
What we don’t realize is that our response to medication, even medications that we may have been taking for 10 years, may result in a problem as we get older. Or it could be that normal adult dosages of medication may create problems because the dosage should be smaller.
I will always remember the time my mother was in the hospital because she fell down at the adult recreation center and cracked her head. She was about 82 years old at the time and taken to emergency at a hospital. Apparently she became very anxious and distraught and the resident in charge gave her a simple dose of valium. It took this poor woman at least 3 weeks to get back to normal.
It took me nearly a week to figure it out. The head injury was mild and required no stitches but it bled a lot as head injuries do. Her snow white hair was pink and there was no concussion. My mother weighed about 105 pounds at the time and it took a long time for the valium to leave her 82 year old body. In the mean time she could not function, didn’t remember anything from one minute to another and acted like a zombie. She went from a screaming wild woman (I’m told) to a very quiet, can’t do anything for herself in less than an hour. What I subsequently found out was that the dosage was probably too much for her
My mother lost a piece of herself with that incident. I already knew that she had a difficult time recovering from anesthesia when she had a couple of minor surgeries. The medications did what they were supposed to do but they were making it tougher for my mother to live an active, normal life. Her reaction wasn’t much different from the 55 year old woman who lost 25 pounds and still received the same dosage of baclofen for multiple sclereosis that she had taken for the past 6 years to control muscle spasms in her leg. Only this time, with the weight loss, the drug built up to toxic levels and her behavior completely changed.
It is so interesting that drug toxicity and reaction is a common problem yet we don’t think about it and neither do our doctors suspect it as a symptom, especially of mental problems. Dizziness, blurred vision, memory laws, loss of balance are all symptoms that someone is having a bad reaction to a drug .and It may be that, like my mother, the dosage was too high or it may be that a person’s ability to metabolize the drug may have changed.
And this isn’t just a problem for older people. More about that in my next post. If you are 40 years old or older, you need to know this.
To your success at healthy aging.
Ruthan Brodsky
Ruthan Brodsky
Health and Business Writer
Content Marketer Copywriter
http://ruthanbrodsky.com
Http://fromretiremnttocareerchange.com