: I've seen people in their forties and fifties become disoriented and
: demented during hospital stays. In the examples I've seen, drugs were
: definitely involved. 

: My own father turned into a vegetable for a short time while in the
: hospital. He was fifty-three at the time, and he was on 21 separate
: medications. The family protested, but the doctors were adamant, telling
: us that none of the drugs interact. They even took the attitude that, if
: he was disoriented, they should put him on something else as well! With
: the help of an MD friend of the family, we had all his medication
: discontinued. He had a seizure that night, and was put back on one drug.
: Two days later, he was his old self again. I guess there aren't many
: medical texts that address the subject of 21-way interactions.

I saw the same thing happen to my father, and I can more or less validate your
take on hospitals.  It seems to me that medical science understands precious
little about taking care of the human machine.  Drugs are given as a
response to symptoms (and I guess that makes sense since all the studies that 
validate the effectiveness of those drugs are based on a narrow
assessment of the degree of particular symptoms).  But there seems
to be very little appreciation for the well-being of a person
outside of the numbers that appear on a test.  I watched my dad
wither away and lose huge amounts of body fat and muscles tissue
while in the hospital.  There is something a little crazy about a
system in which there is more attention paid to giving you every
latest drug available than there is attention paid to whether you
have had enough to eat to prevent loss of muscle tissue.  It is
really, really bizarre.    
