Cleveland Clinic psychologist Cynthia Van Keuren explains medication burden in Parkinson’s, including treatment decisions, risks, and supportive care strategies.
Transcript
The person with Parkinson’s disease and their caregivers will both experience medication burden or pill fatigue, as it might be called.
Managing multiple medications for the Parkinson’s disease can be overwhelming.
There’s a lot of different medications, and the medications have to be dosed at a very specific time. When someone is already struggling to manage that, the idea of making changes to that regimen might feel very daunting and overwhelming, and that might lead to people being reluctant to seek additional support.
So it is important just to know what your doctors might offer you. Doctors are going to want to best understand how distressing or disruptive the psychosis symptoms are before making a lot of adjustments to their routine.
They’re going to want to understand short- and long-term goals, because there are some risks of long-term medications for the management of psychosis or increasing the dopaminergic agents. So again, having a thoughtful conversation about best meeting the needs of the person now and over time can be really helpful.
It’s also important to discuss the potential role of nonpharmacological treatments. Cognitive behavioral therapy, for example, can be helpful in addressing anxiety related to Parkinson’s, anxiety related to psychosis.
There can be some strategies to help reduce the risk of responding to internal stimuli is what we call that, and adjusting to Parkinson’s in general.
The nonpharmacologic treatments can also be useful in keeping open lines of communication between the caregiver, the person with Parkinson’s and their professional support team.
