My mother-in-law visits the doctor about every other week. She demands all manner of diagnostic procedures, pain meds that she is sorely addicted to, and various imaginery complaints that often prove unfounded. She has been taken by ambulance in the middle of the night 3 times in the last year just to get pain medication — this occurred when she ran out of her morphine derivative. She says it is all free and it costs here little of nothing. This attitude and abuse of the system is busting the budget and I suspect it occurs nationwide. She is also on 7 or 8 other drugs and thinks there is a pill for every ailment.
It’s not the elderly that are doing this. It’s the doctors. My father, before he passed on, did the same thing. When I flew in from another state to see him, at my mothers request, I took him to his doctor and I had him bring all his medication. I was amazed at how much the doctors were giving him. A large plastic bag full of medications. If he had a pain, they would give him another pill. The elderly were raised to rely on their doctors. The doctors, today, take advantage of that. Even during my fathers failing, he taught me an important lesson.
I had a stroke a couple of years ago. The doctor put me on blood pressure and cholesterol meds. I told him of my father and that he wasn’t going to put me on 15 different pills. Doctors know that by taking one pill, they may have to put you on another pill to counter the effects of the first pill and it goes on and on. So it’s not the elderly, it’s the doctors that get paid by the pill companies.
The real issue here...is that about 30 percent of the American public over 65...are addicted to pain killers. I used to laugh about this suggested number...but in the past five years...you see more and more cases where doctors discovered that a patient was seeing two or three different doctors and getting the same prescription over and over.