Op-Ed: One-Size-Fits-All Medicine Is Failing Our Seniors

Take this: nearly one-third of hospital admissions among older adults stem from adverse drug reactions—many of them preventable. Meanwhile, as many as 40% of prescriptions given to seniors are unnecessary or inappropriate. These aren’t just statistics. They’re warning signs of a system that isn’t built to meet the realities of aging.

Most older adults live with multiple chronic conditions. This leads to polypharmacy—being prescribed five, ten, even fifteen medications at once. Each drug may be justified on paper, but in practice, the combination can be toxic. Worse, the body’s ability to process medications changes with age—what’s safe for a 40-year-old may be dangerous for an 80-year-old. Yet few doctors are trained to adjust for this.

Consider this common spiral: a senior is prescribed a blood pressure medication that causes dizziness. She falls. She’s given a sedative to help her sleep after the injury. The sedative causes confusion, which is misdiagnosed as early dementia—and another prescription follows. This isn’t hypothetical. It’s the prescribing cascade in action, and it’s happening in clinics and hospitals across the country.

Part of the problem lies in how fragmented care has become. Specialists focus on organs, not the person. A cardiologist may prescribe a diuretic. A neurologist sees the resulting dizziness but misses the cause. A gastroenterologist adds another drug that saps vitamin B12—worsening confusion and balance. The dots don’t get connected, and the patient suffers.

Geriatricians—doctors trained specifically to care for older adults—are the exception. They look at the whole patient, not just the chart. But they are in critically short supply. Fewer than 7,500 serve over 50 million seniors in the U.S. That leaves most elderly patients in the hands of well-meaning doctors who may never have been trained to recognize how aging affects treatment.

Even the clinical research that guides medical decisions is skewed. Seniors—especially those with complex conditions—are routinely excluded from clinical trials. That means the very treatments being prescribed to them were never studied in people like them. The result? A generation of older adults receiving care based on data that doesn’t apply to them.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

We need routine medication reviews for every senior. We need to train all physicians—not just geriatricians—to understand how aging affects drug metabolism, fall risk, and frailty. We need technology—like electronic health record alerts and medication apps—that flag dangerous drug interactions in real time. And we need to demand clinical trials that actually include the population most likely to use the treatments being studied.

Most of all, we need to treat older adults not as problems to manage, but as people to support. That starts by asking: Is this medication helping or hurting? Is this treatment improving quality of life? Are we listening to what this person actually wants? Are we taking enough time for the patient to understand the issue and participate in selecting the treatment?

Aging is inevitable. Receiving unsafe, ineffective care is not. Our seniors deserve medicine that’s built for them—not just adapted to them as an afterthought.

Note: For a more comprehensive exploration of this topic, see: Sims, J. (2025, March 2). Improving healthcare for seniors: Addressing the unique challenges of aging patients. Cielito Lindo Senior Living. https://cielitolindoseniorliving.com/improving-healthcare-to-address-the-unique-challenges-of-aging-patients/