Medications Effect Energy
Some Medications Decrease Energy
Gretchen Heuring | ElderThink | 11.5.10
Some medications or combinations of medications can decrease energy. In her bestseller Another Country, Mary Pipher describes a daughter who has traveled over a thousand miles to visit her mother in the hospital. 
She finds her mother acting very strangely and the hospital personnel are about to place her in the Alzheimer's wing. The young woman pulls together a list of all of the medications her mother brought with her and is taking in the hospital. She then discusses this list with her mother's doctor.
Within a few days, her mother is back to normal and able to communicate fully with everyone because changes were made in her medication. It seems that new medications given to her in the hospital were conflicting with the ones that she brought from home.
This story repeats itself many times every day. Just yesterday, I was having tea with a neighbor, . Her mother-in-law, Shelly, has needed a lot of care, feeling tired and unwilling to just plan get up and go. On shopping trips, Shelly prefered to stay in the car and actually coaxing her to go along was a big effort. Finally, my neighbor took Shelly to see the doctor and sure enough, a change in Shelly's meds made all the difference. Of course my neighbor is much relieved and also pleased to have a little more time to herself now.
There's also the problem of multiple physicians. I know a fellow who has prescriptions from a psychiatrist for adult ADD, a gastroenterologist for reflux, his regular internist for depression and, more recently, an orthopedist for a knee repair. There are big possibilities that he could get conflicting medications or dosages. The only person watching all this is him and if he isn't feeling well, he won't be watching either.
So if older folks are feeling fatigue, the first thing to try is a thorough medication check, discussing very prescription and the dosages with one doctor. Don't worry about what the other prescribing doctors will think, either. They will all work together on this sort of problem, believe me.
