The Great Chemical Offramp: Why Your Sixties Are the Time to Fire Half Your Drugs

By age sixty-five, the average American takes four prescription pills a day. Here is why the safest thing you can do for your future self is to start crossing them off.

Walk into any American home where someone is over sixty-five, and you will eventually find the basket. It is usually plastic, sitting near the kitchen sink or on a bedside table, overflowing with orange plastic bottles. We have been conditioned to believe that more longevity requires more chemistry. But by the time you hit sixty, the biological math flips, and the very pills that kept you active in your fifties can start quietly robbing you of your balance, your memory, and your independence.

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