Maintaining a healthy mind, body, and spirit is as important to the caregiver as it is older adults.
Making sure your elderly family member is taking the right medications is important to getting them up, out and active.
A recent survey of 17,000 Medicare beneficiaries found that 2 out of 5 patients reported taking five or more prescription medicines.
According to Drugwatch.com, adults 65 and older often take multiple medications, both prescription and over-the-counter (OTC) drugs. When people take more than one drug at the same time, it is called polypharmacy. While medications are intended to improve lives and relieve symptoms, in some cases they cause more problems.
Older adults may also fail to take the drugs in the proper way because they lose track of them, and sometimes certain drugs may interact with each other, causing additional symptoms and health problems.
By 2030, about 72 million people will be 65 or older. Today’s seniors live longer than before, which makes it important to make your extra years as fun-filled and pain-free as possible.
Adverse reactions attributable to prescription drug use cause an estimated 100,000 deaths and more than two million serious reactions in the United States each year, costing the healthcare industry more than $136 billion annually.
The PGx Medical Metabolic Validation Program can help reduce unnecessary medications and the risk for adverse drug reactions (ADR). A simple swab of the cheek can tell your healthcare provider what medications your body is able to metabolize which eliminates the trial and error process. This test can improve clinical outcomes and reduce the overall cost of prescription drugs by enabling better drug selection, earlier favorable results and lower rates of ADRs.
For more information, contact PGx Medical at (405) 509-5112 or info@pgxmed.com. www.pgxmed.com