The Pill Pile

Fourteen amber pharmacy bottles and a half-empty tube of steroid cream, dumped out of a shoebox onto a bed: that pile is where The Pill Pile begins, with the author at thirty-eight realizing a single autoimmune flare three years earlier had quietly multiplied into a daily stack of prescriptions treating the side effects of other prescriptions.The book follows a seventy-two-year-old retired teacher whose blood pressure pill led to a diuretic, then a sleep aid, then a fall and a fractured wrist, and a software developer whose two specialists each prescribed a drug with the same overlapping side effect, leaving her convinced she had early dementia. A 2019 report found the number of older adults taking five or more medications had tripled in roughly two decades.Drawing on a clinical pharmacist's explanation of why doctors are trained to start a drug but rarely trained to stop one, the book follows a retired Chicago architect who spent nearly a year tapering off nine prescriptions with a geriatrician's help, and came out walking the lakefront again without a cane.Discover why the right question at a doctor's office is not what should I take next, but do I still need this.