A leading doctor has questioned the wisdom of giving new drugs to elderly people which might only extend their lives for a year or less.
Dr Joe Hennessy, who is chairman of the Health Service Executive West, said that doctors were being put under enormous pressure by pharmaceutical companies to administer new drugs to elderly people.
Dr Hennessy said there was a huge cost factor involved, but he also wondered whether "dragging on the life of an 80-year-old person for another year" was correct. "Maybe we should leave nature to take its course," he said.
Dr Hennessy, a Fianna Fáil councillor from Tipperary, said as a practising GP he was constantly coming under pressure from drugs companies to try out new products. "As GPs we come under great influence from drugs companies to use new drugs and you have people in their 80s or 90s being pumped with drugs for everything.
"For example, the drugs companies might come out with an anti- cholesterol drug. To a person in their 80s or 90s their cholesterol is not really that relevant. Cholesterol is only really important for younger people as it only builds up over a good many years.
"You would then have to question the merit of giving anti-cholesterol drugs to very elderly people and the same would hold for other drugs as well," he said.
Dr Hennessy said quality of life should be considered more.
"You have elderly people slouched on chairs in nursing homes and we are trying to keep them there into their 90s or a 100 years of age by pumping them with drugs. That is no quality of life. They are given so many drugs they then have to get stomach acid drugs to prevent the side effects of all the other drugs.
"If a person is in good health in their 80s, it is not because of high-tech medicines or high-tech quality healthcare.
"It is more likely to be because they have lived a healthy lifestyle and they were lucky enough not to get cancer or have a bad history of heart disease or something like that," said Dr Hennessy.