polypharmacy
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English
Etymology
From poly- + pharmacy, after Ancient Greek πολυφάρμακος (poluphármakos).
Pronunciation
Noun
polypharmacy (uncountable)
- (medicine) The use of multiple drugs to treat multiple concurrent disorders in the same (now especially elderly) patient, chiefly with connotations of indiscriminate or excessive prescription (involving overmedication and overprescription).
- 1997, Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, Folio Society, published 2016, page 226:
- Critics denounced physicians as meddlesome, capriciously practising an often dangerous polypharmacy – a blunderbuss approach.
- 2017, Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World, →ISBN:
- Faced with wheezing, blue-faced patients, they felt they had to do something, and the approach they adopted was polypragmatism, or polypharmacy: they threw the medicine cabinet at the problem.
Derived terms
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