Treating patients with multiple illnesses

This week in the New York Times I picked an article by Siri Carpenter, which discusses the problem with treating patients with multiple illnesses. In most cases when you are working with an elderly patient and they are coming to you with an ailment, it is more than likely that they have other conditions as well that don't relate to one another. The article sites an example of an 84 year old woman named Mazie Piccolo who has "congestive heart failure, an abnormal heart rhythm, arthritis, osteoporosis, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, gastric reflux, and depression." For a doctor it is very hard to treat a person like this, so what they do is treat just the ailment the patient has come in for. Instead of looking at all of her conditions, they prescribe her medication for the one disease, but this pill could worsen the other conditions. Plus, with every doctor prescribing a medication for the one specific disease, there could be a deadly concoction placed in your body when taking them all. Doctors are not afforded the information needed to treat multiple condition patients because there are no studies done for these individuals. "A 2007 study found that 81 percent of the randomized trials published in the ,most prestigious medical journals excluded patients because of coexisting medical conditions." This means that when a doctor prescribes a medication they know it will fix that problem, but are unaware of how it will interact with coexisting problems. 

Personally, I feel that when a doctor treats a patient they should look at the patient as a whole and not a set of individual illnesses, but if they aren't afforded the tools to do so, I don't know how they can. Testing should be done because a majority of elderly have multiple conditions not just one. The problem with that is, testing a prescriptions effects on multiple conditions is very costly and it would be nearly impossible to account for the hundreds of possible combinations of illnesses out there. So I feel it is almost unrealistic, but companies should not exclude patients with coexisting medical conditions so they can see the different variables at work. Doing so may help give them an idea of different effects that may occur.