Many older people are being prescribed medications unnecessarily and without sufficient consideration of adverse side-effects.

Elderly people are being turned into patients by GPs blindly following guidelines to hand out pills for high blood pressure and cholesterol, a professor has said. The ‘paternalistic society’ and medicine by ‘tick box’ has overtaken personal advice, Michael Oliver, emeritus professor of cardiology at Edinburgh University wrote in the British Medical Journal online. He said many of the drugs including those for high blood pressure and statins for raised cholesterol have side effects which many elderly people find debilitating.
Read article in the Daily Telegraph (UK)