It was about 30 years ago, but I can still tell you every detail. I can picture his living room, the state of the front garden, every irrelevant pixel of the whole picture. I was doing a routine home visit to a 70-year-old patient of mine. Bill suffered from COPD but had also amassed a host of other conditions. Today we would have described this as multimorbidity. Back then we called them all chronic illnesses. Indeed, I don’t think we had such a thing as COPD – it was simply called chronic bronchitis. Anyway, as I looked at the extraordinary number of medications that my patient had accumulated over the preceding years, I vowed that it was time to try to rationalise them. Surely they weren’t all really necessary?...