Excess prescribing of pharmaceuticals is a nightmare for both patients and prescribers. It’s much easier to add one medication after another than to take a patient off any. After all, if one is good, aren’t two or three better? And in countries that lack robust primary care, multiple specialists may prescribe multiple medications without any cross referencing. […]
Category: multi morbidity
It is human nature to want to name an illness. This allows patients to come to terms with their symptoms and prognosis. It also permits physicians to adopt a course of treatment. In the case of COVID, diagnosing the disease presents pitfalls as well as opportunities. First, the pitfalls. As new diseases evolve, many of the symptoms associated with […]
Traditional wisdom about chronic diseases holds that they usually last for three months or longer and may worsen over time. They are supposed to occur more in older adults and can usually be controlled but not cured. Conditions, which we thought worsen with age, paradoxically provide some protection. As with preventable disease, identifying risks early in […]
Almost one in four of us has two or more health conditions. With each additional disease, morbidity, mortality and poly pharmacy increases. Some think multiple health problems can be cured by minimizing the uncoordinated care that comes with trying to deal with a number of health problems sequentially and that the focus should be on the […]
Nearly half of all patients admitted to hospital have more than one health problem. The concept of co morbidity is not new. It has been around since the 1970s. Depression is not the end of a one-way street. It can be the cause of other illnesses. What is new, however, is that where more than […]
I n this era of personalized medicine there is nothing general anymore. So why do we persist with terms so wholly inappropriate to the kind of care delivered in the community by doctors? “Family medicine” as a term has the scope to address the newer genetic aspects of our work but still misses out on […]
Having more than one health problem is more common than we think and potentially deadly. Almost one in every four of us has two or more health conditions. With each additional disease morbidity, mortality and polypharmacy increases. Some think multimorbidity can be cured by focusing on the whole patient. Research shows the opposite. Multiple health […]
The Thinker 