Last night’s State of the Union address was full of proposals and promises for everything from job creation to gun control. The problem with an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink speech, however, is making heads or tails of it. As viewers know, President Obama devoted a fair amount of his more-than-an-hour-long address to Medicare. But many are still trying to figure out what it will all boil down to. To get a clear picture of what the future of Medicare could look like, Sarah Cliff of the Washington Post took Obama’s words and broke them down into easy-to-digest pieces. She said that there were
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Archives for prescription medication
Important information for taking generic pills
Many Americans take more than one daily prescription and when doing so, they often rely on the color of the pills to know that they are sticking to their medication schedules. It can be as easy as knowing that every morning they must take one blue pill and one white pill, for example. When switching to generic drugs, however, using a color-coded rule of thumb isn’t always that easy. And that’s because often times, generic drugs are a different color than their brand-name counterparts. According to an article published by WRAL.com, a media outlet covering the Raleigh, Durham and Fayetteville
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Cleaning out the medicine cabinet – an essential New Year’s resolution
How many times have you gone to your medicine cabinet only to be confronted with bottle upon bottle of unused or expired prescriptions? As time passes, medications quickly accumulate, making it more difficult to find space to store new prescriptions and equally hard to find what you’re looking for. According to an article posted on News-Medicine.net, “Because each season brings a host of new illnesses and conditions, it’s easy for medicine cabinets to become cluttered with unused or expired prescriptions, over-the-counter medications, vitamins and herbals that can potentially be harmful to one’s health. Hanging onto old, expired or unused medications
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7 ways for seniors to treat dry mouth
As we here at Freedom Home Care have discussed in previous blog posts, there are many changes that individuals will face as they grow older. Although some of those changes are quite expected, many of the signs of aging will come as a surprise. Dry mouth is one of these unforeseen items. spy apps for android “If [seniors] have a chronic disease managed by medications, one of the side effects is dry mouth,” explained Dr. Marsha A. Pyle, director of the Training Center for Geriatric Oral Health and associate dean of Education at the Case School of Dental Medicine in
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10 questions to ask your healthcare provider about prescription medication
In a recent Freedom Home Care blog, we posted a video from the UCSF’s Memory and Aging Center that covered the importance of understanding the side effects of prescription medication. No matter the drug – be it synthetic or natural – there is always a chance that it will produce an unwanted effect. The possibility for that increases when a patient is taking more than one prescription, considering that those drugs have the potential for interacting with one another. “This does not imply that the drugs are bad, but rather that they should be used carefully in order to reap
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Establishing a prescription drug main brain
In the following video, two doctors, Dr. Andrew Duxbury, professor of clinical geriatrics at the University of Alabama, as well as Dr. Barbara Paris of New York, who specializes in internal medicine and geriatric medicine, discuss the importance of monitoring prescription medication. “One of the concepts that I use with older adults in terms of medication is the one that I call the Main Brain,” Dr. Duxbury explains. “And that is that they have one physician, nurse practitioner or health care provider whom they trust who becomes the keeper of their medication list so that no matter where the buy
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