from McMaster University
One of the most persistent challenges in
healthcare is getting people to take
medications as prescribed. A review of more
than one hundred studies from the
International Cochrane Library confirms if
people take their medicine as prescribed they
usually get better, but only about one‐half of
all patients take medications as directed. It is
a problem that persists despite the many
studies about it. Researchers at McMaster
University say with the costs of health care
increasing, we’ve never needed an answer to
the problem more. To that end, they created
a database of the previous research and made
it available to other researchers. In the
meantime, as the search for answers go on,
patients need to remember if they take
medications as prescribed they usually get
better. But for reasons yet not clear, many of
us fail to follow directions.