Taking Medicines
Side Effects
Older Bodies Handle Drugs Differently
While everyone needs to be careful when taking a medicine, older adults frequently take more than one medication at a time, and anyone taking several medications at the same time should be extra careful. Also, as the body ages, its ability to absorb foods and drugs changes.
As people age, the body's ability to break down substances can decrease, so that older people may not be able to metabolize drugs as well as they once did. Thus, older people sometimes need smaller doses of medicine per pound of body weight than young or middle-aged adults do.
Risks and Benefits
All medicines have risks as well as benefits. The benefits of medicines are the helpful effects you get when you take them, such as curing infection or relieving pain. The risks are the chances that something unwanted or unexpected will happen when you use medicines. Unwanted or unexpected symptoms or feelings that occur when you take medicine are called side effects.
Side effects can be relatively minor, such as a headache or a dry mouth. They can also be life-threatening, such as severe bleeding or irreversible damage to the liver or kidneys.
Tips to Avoid Side Effects
Stomach upset, including diarrhea or constipation, is a side effect common to many medications. Often, this side effect can be lessened by taking the drug with meals. Always check with your doctor, nurse, or pharmacist to see if you should take a particular medication with food.
Here are some more tips to help you avoid side effects:
- Always inform your doctor or pharmacist about all medicines you are already taking, including herbal products and over-the-counter medications.
- Tell your doctor, nurse, or pharmacist about past problems you have had with medicines, such as rashes, indigestion, dizziness, or not feeling hungry.
- Ask whether the drug may interact with any foods or other over-the-counter drugs or supplements you are taking.
- Read the prescription label on the container carefully and follow directions. Make sure you understand when to take the medicine and how much to take each time.
- If you experience side effects, write them down so you can report them to your doctor accurately.
- Call your doctor right away if you have any problems with your medicines or if you are worried that the medicine might be doing more harm than good. He or she may be able to change your medicine to another one that will work just as well.
- Don't mix alcohol and medicine unless your doctor or pharmacist says it's okay. Some medicines may not work well or may make you sick if taken with alcohol.
Drug Interactions
You should always be sure to tell your doctor and/or pharmacist about any and all medications that you take every day or even once in a while. Unwanted effects can occur when a drug interacts, or interferes with, another drug or with certain foods. These chemical interactions change the way your body handles one or both medicines.
In some cases, the overall effect of an interaction is greater than desired. Combining aspirin with blood-thinning drugs such as Coumadin®, also called warfarin, can cause serious bleeding. Mixing Viagra®, also called sildenafil, and the heart drug nitroglycerin can cause blood pressure to plunge to dangerously low levels.
A single glass of grapefruit juice can raise the level of some medications in the blood. This can occur with several types of drugs commonly used to treat heart conditions. Years ago, scientists discovered this "grapefruit juice effect" by luck, after giving volunteers grapefruit juice to mask the taste of a medicine.
Nearly a decade later, researchers figured out that grapefruit juice blunts the effects of an enzyme that breaks down drugs. This leads to higher levels of medicine remaining in the blood, which can cause health problems. Be sure to ask your doctor or pharmacist if it is safe to consume foods or beverages that contain grapefruit with the medication you are taking.
Mixing drugs also can cause effects that are less than what is desired. For example, calcium-rich dairy products or certain antacids can prevent antibiotics from being properly absorbed into the bloodstream. Ginkgo biloba can reduce the effectiveness of blood-thinning medications and raise the risk for serious complications such as stroke.
Learn About Active Ingredients
Learn what active ingredients are in the prescription and over-the-counter medicines you are taking. An active ingredient is the chemical compound in the medicine that works with your body to bring relief to your symptoms.
For example, over-the-counter pain relievers usually contain one or more of four different active pain relief ingredients.
- acetaminophen
- ibuprofen
- naproxen sodium
- aspirin
Many prescription or over-the-counter medicines intended for relief of multiple symptoms, such as cold and flu medications, also include these pain relievers as active ingredients.
Don't combine pain relievers, prescription drugs, or multi-symptom medicines that have the same active pain relief ingredient. This could result in taking too much of that ingredient, and too much of any one ingredient might damage your liver or lead to other serious health problems.
Also, it is a good idea to check what other active ingredients may be present in the over-the-counter medications you are taking. Some may also contain antihistamines, which can cause drowsiness. Caffeine, which is present in some over-the-counter medicines, can interact with certain drugs or with underlying conditions such as high blood pressure.
