I am currently on ten different medications for an illness. Ten! The pills and powders have to be taken at very specific times of day (and night) because some of them contraindicate.
I’m losing my mind trying to keep up with this regimen. It feels like a full-time job.
How do you deal with it? I would appreciate some solid and practical advice, before I give up and throw all the meds away.
I would also like to know why Japanese physicians prescribe ten medications when only two or three would do (at least according to my friends back home).
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I buy one of those pill trackers from daiso/seria. Always helps me when I have so much to keep track of!
Unless your friends back home are doctors ignore them. As someone else noted, get a pill tracker and follow the treatment plan. Medications are different here but doctors are not frivolous. Just be patient and go with it.
Did you get paperwork for every medication prescribed from the pharmacy? I keep everything in its zip lock back and write on the sheet for the medicine when I took it with date and maybe a note like morning, lunch, or dinner. It’s handy for antibiotics to make sure you take the whole shebang and at the right time.
If your friends at home aren’t doctors, I would give the doc here the benefit of the doubt.
Use a pill tracking app. If you’ve got an iPhone, it’s already integrated into the Health app. It has reminders so you don’t forget to take your meds. I use it to keep track of my medication.
As for why they give you so much medicine, I don’t know if it’s true, but I’ve heard it rationalized as giving you medicine for your symptoms/illness and the side effects of the medicines prescribed.
Edits: added info about reminders in Health app
Second using the iPhone app. I have medications that have to be taken at the same time every day or they will potentially stop working, so I have alarms on my phone/watch and then I also set the medications app on the iPhone to remind me/ensure I took them.
You can set reminders for all your medications individually if they have to be taken at different times.
Along with this, as others have said, I have those Daiso pill cases that give compartments for 1 week broken up by morning/afternoon/evening and I carry metal pill canisters on my keychain for 1 day of meds while I am out/not home.
More than ten here 🙂 I checked on Amazon and bought a couple of pill cases that I thought would suit my needs. Always on a Sunday night, I take the time to fill them up, and then I have two weeks worth of medication that I can just take at the right time without thinking about dosages and make the fewest errors.
If you only have one doctor/prescription, you can ask the pharmacy to put the pills into little plastic bags, one for each sitting, so each time you need to take medication, you can just open one baggie, eat what’s in it and be done with it. This can likely only be done by larger pharmacies, not the tiny shops beside little clinics.
And as the others said: Your friends at home are not your current doctors, don’t listen to them.
Take care!
Since you have pills and powders, I would get organized. How many times a day do you need medications? If it’s three, I’d get seven of those three-section files at Daiso. Label each file a day of the week, then pop your morning pills in section one, lunch pills on section two, etc. Make up a week at a time.
If four or five times a day, get a hanging pocket calendar with easily accessible pockets for each day of the month. You should have four or five rows and seven columns. Row one will be labeled Before Breakfast, row two After Breakfast, etc.
A cheaper and better system for on the go is to recycle envelopes. If you have access to a lot of used envelopes, see if you can get seven envelopes of a color for each time period.
Label each envelope clearly with the day of the week and time of medication, and maybe even list the meds inside. Fill all the blue envelopes, then all the green ones, then all the pink ones, etc.
Now, arrange them in a box in chronological order. If you have to be out and about during medication time, it’s easy to slip those medication envelopes into a baggie, then put them in your purse. Be sure to clean out the purse each day and get the envelopes back in the med box.