Jasmine Kelley, MD

 I entered the exam room to find Mrs. Beach peering over her glasses as she pulled prescription bottles from her purse. She squinted to examine the labels, then identified them, declaring, “for my sugar diabetes”, “for my blood pressure”, “for my cholesterol” and so on as she set them on the counter onebyone. The worry lines on her forehead seemed to increase in number with each bottle that was set down. “Doctor,” she asked, shifting her purse on her lap and touching my hand, “Is this too many damned pills?”

 The bottles totaled 14, not including the supplements and over-the-counter meds she’d left at home and was taking on an as-needed basis. After 25 years of practicing medicine and regularly encountering the long lists of medications patients were taking, I was not surprised by this but sighed with exhaustion nonetheless. I couldn’t help but feel this represented a disaster waiting to happen and that Mrs. Beach was, on some level, also aware of this. “We’ll see what can be eliminated,” I assured her, weighing risks and benefits as I spoke those words. Because deprescribing medications may feel like lifting a weight off a patient’s shoulders but doing so could then expose them to the lethality of their chronic diseases. There must be a way to find a happy medium.