How To Improve Your Medication Memory

Here’s a question you should be able to answer without much hesitation: what kind of medication do you take? You’d be surprised how many patients can’t accurately answer that question. Doctors are surprised, too.

A new study out of Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago shows between 40 and 60 per cent of 119 people asked couldn’t tell their physicians which medicine they were on. The problem: if they don’t know and their doctors don’t know, it’s impossible for the medical professionals to prescribe anything else to treat other conditions because there’s a risk of dangerous interactions.

Researchers looked at patients with high blood pressure and asked them to name the specific kinds of pills they were on. They compared their responses to what was on their chart and were disturbed to discover many of them weren’t even close. And that’s just part of the problem.

Some patients admitted they were still taking drugs their physicians had told them to stop using. And even looking at the charts didn’t help that much, because while it indicates what was prescribed, there’s no guarantee the person was actually taking it.

“Does it mean the patients are not responding well to the medication or are they not using the medication?” Dr. Stephen Persell explains about the dilemma. “Patients and doctors have to be in agreement about what drugs patients are actually taking.” The difficulty is especially acute in older people who may be taking more than one drug for a variety of complaints.

What can be done? Persell suggests having people actually bring their pills with them to the doctors’ office can go a long way to filling in the blanks. And changing those long chemical names of drugs to something easier to remember can fill the bill, as well.

Here are some suggestions to help you solve the problem before it becomes one.