Prescription Drug Addiction Treatment for Older Patients
As the population ages and Baby Boomers slide into senior status, misuse of prescription drugs is becoming more and more of a problem. As new drugs are developed to treat the usual problems of aging, older patients can find themselves with an entire pharmacopia to deal with. The issue is compounded by the increase in medical specialization, which means a patient may be seeing—and getting prescriptions from—many different practitioners, most of whom don’t communicate with each other. The result, far too often, is over-medication and sometimes addiction.
Most commonly, people become addicted to pain medications such as Vicodin and