polypharmacy
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 1.56 in modern English
29
Scrabble Score
12
Letters
3
Syllables
9
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
The use of multiple drugs to treat multiple concurrent disorders in the same (now especially elderly) patient, chiefly with connotations of indiscriminate or excessive prescription (involving overmedication and overprescription).
Uncountable
Example Sentences
- "Critics denounced physicians as meddlesome, capriciously practising an often dangerous polypharmacy – a blunderbuss approach."
- "Faced with wheezing, blue-faced patients, they felt they had to do something, and the approach they adopted was polypragmatism, or polypharmacy: they threw the medicine cabinet at the problem."