Over 1 million Canadians visited hospitals in 2015 and 2016 due to concerns about potentially inappropriate medication prescribed to senior citizens, according to an analysis of data from The Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI). Nearly 1 million of those visits, over 900,000, were in Ontario.

That number outweighs every other reason for a hospital visit in the CIHI data.

This isn’t the first time that seniors, and those that care for them, have become aware of the sheer number of prescription medications that seniors take.

65 per cent of seniors take 5 or more prescription medications, with that number growing with a patient’s age, according to a 2014 report by CIHI. 40 per cent of seniors 85 and older take more than 10 medications a day.

The Canadian Deprescribing Network (CaDeN) is investigating how many of those medications are really necessary.

Dr. Barb Farrell and Dr. Cara Tannenbaum co-created CaDeN, an organization aiming to phase out medication that is no longer needed or simply lower the dosage of some medications for patients.

“Stopping medicines not only made people feel better but started to make them live longer,” Dr. Justin Turner, CaDeN’s Assistant Director, said.

According to CaDeN, some medications can cause more harm than good as patients grow older or more ill.

Turner explained that the older a person gets the more medical conditions they often have to deal with. With each condition comes a set of guidelines on which medications to take.

“By the time you get the guidelines for those conditions, you’re on 15 medications,” Turner said.

In this case, more medicine does not always lead to a healthier body.

“A lot of people are in the hospital because while they were taking the right medicines, the medicines did not mix well together,” Turner said.

CaDeN works with healthcare professionals and patients alike to evaluate prescribed medications and decide which are necessary and which are not.

“70 per cent of older adults in Canada would be willing to stop their medications if their doctors told them to,” Turner said. The only problem is that most doctors don’t believe that’s true, according to Turner.

Ina Cox, 76, takes 6 prescription medications a day. She doesn’t even know what some of them do.

“The doctor told me I need to take them for different things, so I take them,” Cox said, “You assume they know best.”

Turner suggests that if patients want to take a stab at deprescribing, they start a conversation with their family doctor. It all comes down to the patient to get the ball rolling.

Turner does stress, however, that consulting with your family doctor is of the utmost importance when attempting to lower the dosage of a medication, or stop taking it altogether.

The overmedication of seniors isn’t just a Canadian issue. In the United States, seniors account for less than half of all hospital stays, but the majority of their visits revolve around complications with their medications, according to a 2014 action plan by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

In the end, it all comes down to patients and their individual needs.

“I really started to notice that when we focused on individual patients and what their needs are – we could stop a lot of their medicines and they felt better,” Turner said.