Polypharmacy

Polypharmacy is the simultaneous use of multiple medicines by a single patient to treat their conditions. It is most often defined as the regular use of five or more medications, though the term is also applied more loosely to a patient taking two or more drugs at once, and there is no single universally agreed definition. Polypharmacy becomes more common in older adults and in people with several long term conditions, known as multimorbidity, and while taking multiple medicines is not automatically harmful, it raises the risk of drug interactions and side effects, so careful medical review is needed to confirm that every medicine a patient takes is still necessary and beneficial.