Elderly Patients Aggressively Over-treated with Pharmaceuticals

(NaturalNews) Researchers from the Cochrane Collaboration research group have determined that seniors over the age of 80 are being given too many drugs and in too high of doses. Particularly with high blood pressure, doctors are too aggressively treating the elderly with pharmaceuticals which is doing them more harm than good.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), nearly a quarter of all Americans between 20 and 75 have hypertension while roughly 70 percent of those over 75 have it.

The conventional approach to treating high blood pressure is to prescribe a variety of drugs that, together, doctors hope will achieve a target of 140/90 mmHg. However after scouring several studies to see if such treatments are actually working, Dr. James Wright, head of Cochrane, found that too many drugs in very large doses is having no positive effect. In fact, he found that the more conservative the approach, the more beneficial the results.