One of the greatest advances in Geriatric Medicine during the last quarter of a century has been the increased realization of the possibilities of treatment for elderly patients. Neglect has been replaced by a more optimistic therapeutic endeavour and countless old people have benefitted from this approach. But there is also a drawback, and this is the risk of hazardous side effects of medication which are often directly proportional to the biological potency of the drug and may be unpredictably increased due to changes in the senile organism. In fact the anatomical and biological changes in...