Polypharmacy - Is More Medication Making Us Less Healthy?
posted 28th August 2026
Polypharmacy is defined as taking five or more medications daily. Amongst older populations, especially those in nursing homes, it is not uncommon for people to be taking as many as eight or nine medications daily. The result of this can be a tangled web of drug interactions, side effects and unintended harm. The more medications someone is taking, the more likely they are to experience side effects.
Research shows that ultimately, polypharmacy can result in death. In fact iatrogenic harm, which is harm caused by medical treatment and not the illness itself, is now the third leading cause of death globally. In the UK alone, over 1 in 10 people aged 65 and above, take at lease 8 prescribed medicines each week, rising to nearly 1 in 4 for those aged 85 and over.
What Leads to Polypharmacy
As people age, long term health conditions such as high blood pressure, diabetes, acid reflux and heart disease often accumulate. Each diagnosis potentially brings another prescription. Yet while medicines are readily started, they are not always reviewed with the same enthusiasm and relatively few are discontinued. Accepting polypharmacy as an inevitable consequence of ageing, risks normalising the harms we should be trying to prevent. There should be in place regular conversations about whether nutrition, lifestyle and other evidence based approaches could address the underlying drivers of chronic disease instead of simply adding another medication.
How is Polypharmacy Harmful
The trouble with polypharmacy is that the danger is not always obvious. An older patient may seem to be managing their medications well - until dizziness becomes a fall, confusion is mistaken for cognitive decline or a side effect leads to depletion of key nutrients such as vitamins and minerals. Multiple medications also add to the load on organs of detoxification such as the liver and kidneys. A person taking a medication must recover twice, once from the disease and once from the medication. It is also important to remember that many medications are a sticking plaster for a health condition. For example, blood pressure may be increased during a stressful time but once the individual had been able to manage their overall stress their blood pressure reduces and the medication is no longer needed. Natural nutrition and lifestyle strategies to support stress may mean the medication would not have been required at all.
Deprescribing and Safer Prescribing
Unfortunately, our modern healthcare model results in overprescribing rather than safer prescribing. Doctors and GPs are given just 10 minutes to see a patient and potentially prescribe a medication. Pharmacists are also now prescribing more medications. Deprescrbing, the planned and supervised reduction or withdrawal of medication, is an exception rather than the norm and is often only at the instigation of the patient. Safer prescribing starts with asking whether every medication still serves a clear purpose, stopping those that are no longer necessary.
Personalised Health
Before another medication is added, we should be asking not just what condition does this individual have, but who is the person taking it? What is their nutritional status and hydration? How is their stress load, metabolic health and physical activity? Have they shown unusual sensitivity to medicines, chemicals or other substances? Have they previously experienced an extreme reaction that may reveal something important about their individual susceptibility. Proper informed consent should consider not just the risks and benefits of each new drug but also those arising from a combined treatment burden. None of this means treatments should be withdrawn but used with greater discernment. The safest and most appropriate interventions should always be considered first. Sometimes this may be a prescription medication, an operation or further diagnostic investigations. But sometimes addressing nutrition, hydration, movement, sleep, stress, social connection or another evidence-based natural approach may be a more appropriate first step.
Summary
Unfortunately, the answer to polypharmacy is not simply fewer pills but better overall healthcare. And this requires taking responsibility for our health into our own hands to allow us to make the right informed decisions that are personal to us. Working with Medicinal Eating Nutritional Therapy can help you unravel your prescriptions and provide information on potential drug interactions and nutrient depletions. Even more importantly, it can help you take back responsibility and ownership of your health and provide a wealth of information about what specific support your own body needs. This may be supporting a prescription medication but could also be providing personalised nutrition and lifestyle advice or functional testing that assesses the needs that are unique to you.
If you would like to book a free discovery call to see how Nutritional Therapy can help you, please contact Medicinal Eating or email direct at info@medicinaleating.co.uk.
