MANY thanks to Linda King (November 10) for thanking me for my letter (November 4) concerning the relationship between physicians and pharmaceutical companies.

Referring to older people, she writes: “They’re given something, have side effects from that drug, given another drug to combat the side effects and so it goes on.”

I retrospectively realise this was more or less my own experience in my 30s when, having been prescribed (for panic attacks) what turned out to be a particularly unpleasant ‘minor tranquilliser’, I ended up, three years later, swallowing a cocktail of six products.

I shall not harp on about the unexpected consequent horrors awaiting me but switch my attention to the plight of my father’s twin sister’s husband.

He and my aunt were being treated in hospitals half a county apart for cancer, his acute and curable, hers fatal.

Like Linda’s late mother-in-law, he was discharged, having been too ill to arrange or attend his wife’s funeral, to a cold and extremely empty dwelling “with a plastic bag full of packets of tablets” and “no idea about how and when to take them.”

I was living nearby and was able to draw up a complex chart on how and when he should take the 12 drugs concerned, though I still needed to visit him three or four times a day to check he was acting accordingly.

One of his ‘medicines’ was mood-altering and potentially highly addictive and neither of us could initially understand why he was intermittently so cheerful and driving a little more ‘adventurously’: we rapidly put a stop to that.

He went on to remarry and live quite a number of years but who knows what may have occurred had he not had someone to guide him through that patch?

DAVID DIMENT, Riverside Court, Oxford