Patients with intellectual disability at risk of entrenched polypharmacy, doctors warn
Dr Adrian Keller says doctors should have the courage to disrupt the status quo.
Sometimes Dr Adrian Keller inherits a patient with an intellectual disability who has been on risperidone for longer than a decade.
“When a patient is complex, and there have been multiple providers over many years, even decades, the constant in all of that is the medication they are on,” the NSW psychiatrist tells AusDoc.
“Lots of other moving parts have to be dealt with in these cases, so if something is stable and doesn’t appear to be an immediate problem, you tend to leave it.
“The longer you do that, the more it becomes entrenched.”
