Friday, December 7, 2007

Antipsychotics, Nursing Homes And Abuse

Keeping them quiet down on the farm. That’s the tone of one story after another these days about how nursing homes increasingly give antipsychotics to patients, whether they need them or not. And of course, the tab is often picked up, unnecessarily by Medicaid, for instance. A couple of weeks ago, The St. Petersburg Times ran such a piece in which Barbara Hengstebeck, executive director of the Coalition to Protect America’s Elders in Tallahassee, Fla., offered an explanation: “A lot of people feel like the elderly in nursing homes are expendable.”

The latest spend-a-gram comes from The Wall Street Journal, which notes that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services says nearly 21 percent of nursing-home patients who don’t have a psychosis diagnosis are on antipsychotic drugs. The use comes amid a wider debate about how to care for the rising numbers of seniors, many of whom have behavior problems stemming from dementia. And a big question, the paper writes, is whether to use a medical model - administering these meds as the way to alleviate distressing symptoms or trying to find other ways to help these patients.

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