Polypharmacy: A cankerworm we have to tackle

It's science time again....
As always, be rest assured I won't be boring you with medical jargons, Infact, I'll give you an absolute illustration for the topic, Polypharmacy.
Most of us are propellers of this cankerworm polypharmacy even without us knowing what it means, so let's start with a definition.

This is the act of taking many drugs or rather many unnecessary drugs at the same time whereas that particular illness could be properly managed by just taking a single drug.

Source

In a lay man's term, you know that particular moment you get to a pharmacy or chemist shop and tell the chemist that you're suffering from malaria and typhoid even without any laboratory investigation or diagnosis from a doctor requesting the chemist to not just give you an antimalarial drug card but rather telling him to mix drug for you?
Then, the chemist brings different drugs together and it gets to maybe 8-9 drugs so he could give you a big bill, That is polypharmacy!!.

Just this last week Wednesday, we had a surgery case which was obviously complicated by polypharmacy.
The patient in question had hydronephrosis but he was treating malaria and typhoid every month thinking that was his problem and this was because he could just simply walk into any pharmacy or chemist shop and request that drugs should be mixed for him even without diagnosis...
The sad aspect of this polypharmacy is that it always give the patient a momentary relief and he or she thinks everything is alright whereas it isn't.

Polypharmacy is on the increase especially in this part of the country where the number of illiterates and poverty is on the increase and it keeps on complicating even small cases that would have been managed easily...
Also, polypharmacy is also engineered by old age. This is because as we grow older, our body system gets older and we invariably starts suffering from many chronic illnesses which prompts the intake of many drugs more than required.

• Costlier:
  Often times, we think we're saving money by mixing drugs whereas we spend higher because the disease we think we treated was poorly treated and will come back with greater force within some months and we mix drug again unlike when we treat it with the required drug.

• Increased adverse drug reactions:
  Drugs are chemicals and chemicals react with each other.
  The more we combine different drugs and in extension different chemicals we keep exposing ourselves to adverse drug reactions.

• Untimely death:
  Polypharmacy most times complicates our health condition and because it gives us temporarily relief, we fail to present to the hospital until the illness gets out of hand that our life becomes endangered and if care isn't taken, we might end up losing our life.

So today, you've learnt what polypharmacy is and the dangers that comes with it.... I hope that you will stop partying with that and together we can end this cankerworm that is eating us up.

Thanks for reading and happy Sunday!
Have a nice day!!