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Introduction
Medication Overload: The use of multiple medications for which the harm to the patient outweighs the benefit. There is no strict cutoff for when the number of medications becomes harmful, but the greater number of medications a person is taking, the greater their likelihood of experiencing harm, including serious adverse drug events. Every day, 750 older people living in the United States (age 65 and older) are hospitalized due to serious side effects from one or more medications. Over the last decade, older people sought medical treatment or visited the emergency room more than 35 million times for adverse drug events, and there were more than 2 million hospital admissions for serious adverse drug events. Older adults are hospitalized for adverse drug events at a greater rate than the general population is hospitalized for opioids. In the past decade, prescribing multiple medications to individual patients (called “polypharmacy” in the scientific literature) has reached epidemic proportions. More than four in ten older adults take five or more prescription medications a day, an increase of 300 percent over the past two decades. Nearly 20 percent take ten drugs or more. When over-the-counter medications and supplements are included, the number of older people taking five or more drugs rises to 67 percent. (Lown, 2019)