Pills, Not Taken
- 32 million Americans take three or more medications daily.
- Nearly 75% of Americans report not always taking their medications as prescribed.
- Almost 30% of Americans stop taking their medicine before it runs out.
- Only about half of patients with high blood pressure take their prescribed doses of drugs
Source: PhRMA; National Council on Patient Information and Education; WSJ reporting
If we all took our medicine as we should, I’d think it would cut back on the costs fixing what goes wrong later.
Something that might reduce medication non-adherence is to get pharmacists more involved in medication management. Physicians may not have the time to fully explain side effects or explore other alternative medications. One of the reasons people stop taking drugs is because they don’t understand how important a drug is to their health or they cannot tolerate the side-effects.
Ah, yes. Noncompliance. We can’t have that, can we?
Does anyone know why people don’t comply? Side effects making people decide the cure is worth the disease? Perhaps no need to take the med as prescribed (applies to a lot of people with pain relievers)? Trying different drugs to get the right mix?
And the ever present how good is the estimate? No one actually watches the pills being ingested so the usual proxies are filling and refilling prescriptions.
If the truth be known, I doubt if noncompliance makes much of a difference in health status. Health status might be improved due to taking cholesterol and hypertensive medications maybe. But there’s a lot of worthless drugs and overmedicated seniors out there.
@Anne
Consider that some people are taking medications that they shouldn’t be taking but that they think they should be taking or that others think they should be taking and have told them to take (i.e. wrong diagnoses). People taking the wrong medications or a bad combination of medications (interacting) has its costs as well.
I do believe that over-medication is a problem in this country.
I must admit that I rarely comply with medication instructions. It’s usually side effects that make me noncompliant. Drowsiness is the worst. I’ll suffer for days to avoid feeling groggy.
I’m glad to know that I’m not alone.