The Importance of Medication Management

Good health is more than just how well your body functions or how physically fit you are; it’s also about how well you can cope with things, your emotional state, and your understanding of the world around you. These are matters of mental health, and treatment for issues affecting it has to address your psychological, emotional, and social faculties to provide positive results. 

Many factors can affect your mental health, and getting the right balance of medications is sometimes a key method of helping you get better. This is where medication management comes in, and to understand why it’s so important, let’s review some basics about how it works.

If you live in Bellevue, Washington, and you’re navigating mental health issues that need this or other options to help you cope, Jeanne Nicholson, ARNP, PMHNP-BC and the staff at Nicholson Psychiatry, PLLC are here for you.

What is medication management?

Getting the right medication to treat your problems is important; however, if you have multiple issues that need a variety of drugs to deal with, some form of medication management is necessary. In terms of mental health problems, the primary goal of this method of managing treatment is to ensure you’re taking the right dose, adjusting when necessary, avoiding bad interactions with other drugs, and avoiding possible side effects as much as possible.

Why is it so important?

Problems related to misuse or overuse of medications lead to an estimated 1.5 million preventable severe side effects or other forms of adverse events annually in the US alone, making it a major health problem. While some of these issues may be the result of dependency or other misuse, often, it’s a lack of understanding of how different types of drugs can interact with each other to cause those reactions and endanger your health. This makes it all the more necessary to have an experienced pharmacologist or other specialist who’s knowledgeable about the different drugs you take for various problems to make sure we can avoid these complications.

How does it work?

Medication management is not complicated, but it’s important to stay vigilant regarding the proper dosage and any changes in the medicine you’re getting. Here’s the process for starting our medical management:

Initial assessment

A psychiatric assessment is necessary to gauge your needs, in combination with understanding what medications you’re already on.

Diagnosis

Once we’ve determined the problem we’re dealing with based on the assessment, we can start planning what to do next.

Personalized treatment plans

This is where we can judge the treatment methods and determine, based on your needs and other medications, how much to start you on.

Monitoring

Once you’ve started on a regimen, we monitor how well the treatment is improving your symptoms and track side effects and any other adverse reactions.

Treating mental illness can be done in a lot of different ways, but when using drugs to help we have to be careful about making the right choices. Contact Dr. Nicholson and Nicholson Psychiatry today to get an assessment of your problems and find out how we can help.