There is a piece of art on display in the British Museum, part of the set-up for which is that the average person living in the UK will get prescribed 14,000 pills over the course of their approximately three-score-years-and-ten.
Currently, I am taking sixteen pills a day: 4 paracetamol; 3 NSAID of some description; 3 hyoscine butylbromide; 1 citalopram; 1 amitriptyline; 1 omeprazole; 1 loratadine; 1 B-vitamin; 1 C-vitamin. The vitamins aren't prescribed (but I'm demonstrably less mad when taking B supplements, and colds are much less debilitating when I'm taking prophylactic vitC); the paracetamol are; and sometimes I'm up at 8 paracetamol, and sometimes I take codeine, and sometimes I take diazepam or temazepam, and sometimes I'm on a citalopram dosage that requires me to take 2 tablets instead of one; so let's say that 15 is a nice round approximate number. This has pretty much been my regular meds regime since mid-2012.
That's 5475 pills a year. Approximately. Which gets me up to 14,000 in a little over two and a half years; or, to put it another way, since getting settled with this med regime in summer 2012 I've taken as many tablets as most people in the UK do in their entire lives.
Remove any of them - except, maybe, the vitC - and my function decreases measurably within days.
Damn right I have given up on getting better.
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