Take All Your Pills and Call Me In The Morning
Drug companies are beginning to realize that a huge proportion of patients aren’t taking their medications as often as they’re prescribed. And they’re finally concluding that they could make more money if people actually took them all daily. An NYT article looks at the trend, including drug companies calling patients and encouraging them to continue taking their meds. It brings up a number of good points: what happens when the medication goes generic? If you switch to a different version of the same medication class, does the patient get kicked out of the program?
I’ve always thought that drug companies should be handing out free weekly or monthly pill boxes to patients with polypharmacy to increase adherence (it’s adherence, NYT, not compliance), but that’s just me.
Non-generic drug is money making vehicle to those drug company. Need to change the way of thinking of our law makers in united states which will only lead affordable medication… Form directly drug company? forget it………
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I agree that adherence is a better term than compliance, but I’m still hearing and seeing the latter term much, much more. So much so that I was reading about noncompliance the other day and thinking to myself “What is that other word again?” Who even wants to think of herself as compliant? Suggests something halfway between pliant and complicit. Maybe I am am an especially defiant patient myself, though. Adherent… a patient who sticks to something. Nice American value of stick-to-it-iveness, definitely more positive, more sense of choosing a course than of just going along with authority.
I guess when the money’s tight, it’s all-too-easy to start spreading out those pills by only taking half a tab daily, especially when you’re feeling pretty healthy.
In the March 13th edition of The Wall Street Journal, there is an article that chronicles a new breed of drug reps: the “undrug rep.” It states that a company based in Philadelphia is paying these “detailers,” as I believe they are called, to inform docs of the benefits of prescribing more generics or steering away from prescription drugs all together. She is backed by a Harvard education, a Harvard educational stamp of approval (which leads to CME credits after passing a small quiz), she is a pharmacist, and she previously worked for Eli Lilly as a rep. So, she has an impressive resume and carries much clout. I encourage you to read the article.
“She” is the protagonist of the article.