Holidays and the Aging: Looking at All Those Pills That Mom is Taking

The holiday season is upon us, and is the time of year when many families get a "good look" at aging family members for the first time in a while, and the changes that are noticed are often troubling. For those where distance is involved, adult children and grandchildren often don't really know if Mom or Dad have developed health issues, physical issues, or even memory problems that they may have been hiding. During this time of year, it is especially important, while sharing the holiday spirit with family, to also look carefully at elderly family members, to determine if there are issues that need to be addressed.

Elder Care Cafe discusses a very important issue: your aging parent's medications:

Have you ever heard kids make remarks about the amount of pills Grandpa or Grandma take? Children have a tendency to speak what they think whether we like it or not. However, the observation is often pretty accurate. The truth is that senior citizens sometimes find themselves taking a vast array of pills and medications. Finding a way to manage their medication may end up at the top of a caregiver’s to-do list.


The real concern with that much medication being used at the same time is medicine interaction. If your elderly mom or dad takes five, six, seven or more pills at a time, it’s easy to imagine that one of those medications might get into conflict with another. This is not an idle concern.


Many drug related overdoses or interaction problems happen to senior citizens every year because they combined their many prescription medications with over the country drugs or with alcohol, and the chemical reaction in their bodies became explosive. Depending on how many pills and how often they need to take each pill, having a pill dispenser to measure out the drugs for an entire week may help keep it all straight.


Because you are the caregiver to your aging mom or dad, it is up to you to come up with some strict rules that you have to insist become the law of the land for your mom or dad to assure that there is little or no possibility of a drug related reaction which could lead to hospitalization or death.

Here are the key players in keeping your aging parent’s medications under control:

Read the rest of the article at Elder Care Cafe...