polypharmacy
nounEtymology From poly- + pharmacy, after Ancient Greek πολυφάρμακος (poluphármakos).
1
Medicine, Sciences 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).
- Critics denounced physicians as meddlesome, capriciously practising an often dangerous polypharmacy – a blunderbuss approach.1997, Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, Folio Society, published 2016, page 226:
- 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.2017, Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World, →ISBN:
- Derived terms
- hyperpolypharmacy