A pill for every ill
"So when I was a specialist in internal medicine what I very often did was that I stopped a lot of drugs particularly in elder people, and it is quite revealing to see a bed-ridden elderly person come into your ward and when you stop the drugs that person becomes many years younger.
Many of these drugs affect the brain and old people tolerate that very very badly. They fall and when they break a hip a quarter of them die. For example anti-depressant drugs are used in more than 10% of our (Denmark) elderly, and they seem to kill 3% of them every year. ... And then they interact in ways we know almost nothing about. Very many elderly they take more than 5 drugs a day and we actually don't know how these drugs interact with each other. What we do know is that all drugs have many effects in the body ... so we make a lot of harms that we don't even recognize."
- Professor Peter Gøtzsche.
The challenge:
One of the solutions:
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