Sue: Taking complementary medicines – Consistency with beliefs and values
Listen to patients and health professionals speak about their experience with taking multiple medicines.
Sue
Female
Age at interview: 65
Number of medicines: 16
Cultural background: Anglo-Australian
Sue found a GP who takes a holistic approach to healthcare, which aligns with her beliefs. It annoys her when people do not respect her position and tell her she is wasting her time and money on complementary medicines.
Well that's one of the reasons I went to this doctor; he was a friend of mine. A friend of a friend had been to him and been very impressed because he's looking, not just at the illness but he's looking at the rest of my system and how it's functioning and how it's having to cope or adjust because of this illness that's affecting the liver. So he'll boost things. So one of the things, for instance, he says in autoimmune disease is often digestion is suppressed so you don't … you know you might be eating terribly well but you're not getting the benefit of it.
So one of the things that he was … prescribes and recommends that I take is a digestive at the start of each meal so that my digestive processes are more effective and I'm getting the benefit of what I eat. So it's that sort of thing that maybe I'd get with a mainstream doctor, I don't know, but I'm inclined to think I wouldn’t and I prefer to take this … it's a sort of more holistic approach, which makes more sense to me … as I say it's seems to be paying off so it's good … I think well, for me, because a lot of my medications are complementary it's the nature of the medication is the one that I'm up against most. Because I also have ended up in hospital which is very mainstream medication, where a lot of these complementary medications … people are not openly sneering but they wouldn't endorse it and they wouldn't prescribe it themselves.
So they tolerate, but I do feel tolerated sometimes like oh yes, what are you wasting your money on those for? I do, I must say … obviously I'm committed to it, I wouldn't be doing it otherwise and spending so much money on it, but I do get very defensive when I hear people talking about you might as well just pour your money down the toilet and all that sort of stuff. My evidence is that it's doing me good, so I get annoyed with that sort of attitude which maybe I'm reading into people's responses and it isn't really there but I feel like it is.
The Living with multiple medicines project was developed in collaboration with Healthtalk Australia.