Medication adherence, which is really the extent to which patients take medication as prescribed by their doctors, is important to the medication’s effectiveness to cure and treat the particular illness.  Poor medication adherence can have a particularly negative impact on the medication’s ability to treat many diseases, causing more severe complications from the illness and decreased quality of life for patients.   Many factors cause poor adherence; the most common ones being the inability to pay for medications, lack of belief that the treatment is necessary or helping, busy schedules, forgetfulness, and confusion about how and when to take the medication.

The Food Drug Administration recently published an article on its website, which discusses the importance of medication adherence and provides tips on how to take different types of medication correctly.  For example, when taking antibiotics, the FDA warns strict medication adherence is vital.  If antibiotics are not taken as prescribed by the doctor, a small number of bacteria is likely to survive and continue to replicate and become resistant to the antibiotics.  The same reasoning goes for the HIV virus.  When patients with AIDS skip or stop taking their prescribed medication, they might develop strains of HIV that are more resistant to the prescribed medication and even some medications that patients aren’t currently on.

The FDA advises people to communicate with their doctors or pharmacists if they are experiencing side effects of their prescribed medication and understand how long they need to take the medication.  Setting a daily routine to take medication, keeping medications in noticeable places, using daily dosing containers, and keeping written or computerized schedules are all good ways to help people remember to take their medication.

Ultimately, if there is ever an issue of negligence, consumers want to make sure it is medical negligence outside of their control and not negligence of their own.  Making sure you properly take medications, at least according to the FDA, is an important consumer health issue.

Tags: FDA, lawsuits, lawyers, medial negligence, Medical Malpractice, medication adherence

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009 at 2:13 pm and is filed under Medical Malpractice, health care fraud, hospital negligence, hospitals, mass torts, medical device litigation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.