A pharmacist focused on medication-induced cognitive decline.

I’m a pharmacist with a background in long-term care and geriatric pharmacy. Across those years, I saw a recurring problem: when an older adult becomes more confused, it is often attributed to dementia before anyone reviews the full medication list.

Medications accumulate over time. New prescriptions get added, older ones rarely get stopped, and a dose that was appropriate at 65 can be too strong at 85. When no single prescriber looks at everything together, interactions and side effects can go unnoticed and be mistaken for cognitive decline.

Sudden confusion in an older adult is often a medication problem, not a brain problem.

I moved into home care to address this where it is hardest to see, in the home itself. I own Options Home Care, a pharmacist-owned non-medical home care agency with offices in Greensboro and Burlington, North Carolina.

My focus is translation: explaining medication complexity in language families can understand and act on, while giving the professionals who refer to them, discharge planners, social workers, and care coordinators, a systematic method they can trust. That method is the MEDIC Framework, a structured medication review I use before accepting a cognitive decline diagnosis.