Modern medicine allows people to live longer and better, but with these life-enhancing therapies comes a risk of what clinicians call an adverse drug reaction (ADR) and laymen know as side effects.
This is especially the case with polypharmacy (when patients take five or more drugs at the same time), says Liat Primor, veteran of the pharmaceutical industry and CEO and co-founder of FeelBetter, a startup dedicated to improving outcomes for patients taking multiple medications.
“Sometimes patients have not only one condition, they have plenty – 10 or 15 – and they take so many medications,” Primor tells NoCamels.
“They call them the yellow pills, the blue pills, the purple pills,” she says. “They don’t even know that they have a ‘bad pill.’”
Primor describes a scenario in which a medication causes an unwelcome side effect such as insomnia, which leads a patient’s doctor to prescribe another drug to treat that, which then causes constipation, which again requires another regular course of treatment and so on.
“Instead of changing the first medication, now they have a second medication and a third,” she says.
The situation is exacerbated when a patient sees multiple doctors for multiple conditions, with each physician treating a particular disorder rather than taking a holistic look at a patient’s treatments.
Keep reading at nocamels.com.
FeelBetter Co-founders CEO Liat Primor and CTO and COO Yoram Hordan are Technion alumni.
