Mia: The attitudes of others – Taking ‘many’ medicines (2)
Listen to patients and health professionals speak about their experience with taking multiple medicines.
Mia
Female
Age at interview: 30
Number of medicines: 12
Cultural background: Israeli-Australian
One doctor Mia saw questioned her about taking one medicine ‘for the rest of her life’. Mia agreed to stop taking it for a while, but doing so made her feel unwell.
Ironically, the only person who has really said, ‘Why the hell are you taking all of that? You shouldn’t’ was a doctor with the sertraline. I went back, I was living in Bondi at the time, I went back to her, who I had seen maybe once or twice for something else, the same prescription thing and said, can I please have another prescription? My prescription has run out.
She I think was a little on the left side of things and said, but do you really want to be taking medication for the rest of your life? Maybe you should try some other techniques and I'm not going to give you this prescription and essentially made me feel a little bit guilty like I was drug seeking. So I said, okay, fine, I will give it a shot and within a few months I felt dreadful again.
So that's the only person who has ever tried to stop me taking my medication other than a friend who is like, what are you taking? What do you always take? I say, it's for my Crohn's or I have Crohn's and that's what I take. I don’t think I ever tell anyone about the sertraline. The stigma right or wrong is still there, but that's the only time I have ever been told, stop taking it, and that was by a medical professional who I think really did the wrong thing by me at that stage.
The Living with multiple medicines project was developed in collaboration with Healthtalk Australia.