Sounds like medical malpractice to me. No matter how much pain you’re in you don’t take that many meds of that many types. That’s an Rx to kill a healthy elephant.
I could guess that he had visited multiple physicians. That’s harder to do today, but with concierge medicine still possible.
And it’s easy enough for a physician to throw a pill at a problem, rather than saying hey, wait, you’re pushing yourself to death and until you stop doing that, the pill is only going to blind you to that until it’s too late.
Now once he’s taking it easy, then fine. But he’s likely to need far fewer pills at that point.