What good are drugs if patients don’t take them? That’s exactly what reporter Katherine Hobson asks in her article for The Wall Street Journal, “How Can You Help the Medicine Go Down?” According to the World Health Organization, half of chronically ill patients in the developed world don’t take their drugs properly, while another study estimates that 90,000 premature deaths in the U.S. are due to poor adherence to high blood pressure treatment alone.
How can we combat this growing problem? There is no easy solution, but allowing physicians and other health care providers to track whether patients are refilling their medications could be a good start. Also, getting pharmacists involved to encourage patient prescription compliance could help, while addressing individual patient concerns could mitigate the problem, as well.
Read the full story here.