• What leads to polypharmacy?
• Both patient and physician factors result in over-prescribing of drugs
• Patient factors including communicating that a prescription medicine is expected
• Also, not reporting all currently used medicines or symptoms that might be drug induced can result in duplicate prescriptions or treating drug effects with additional drugs
• A strong predictor of polypharmacy is seeing multiple physicians and using multiple pharmacies, which leads to incomplete knowledge by physicians of all drugs taken

Copyright 1999 by the GEC