Abstract
When I’m part of a medical group, and we get down to nitty-gritty issues, the most frequent question I’m asked is, “What can I do about the patient who won’t take his medicine?” From a medical perspective this is what compliance is all about — how to get patients to follow a regimen which is “in their best interests.” But in this seemingly straightforward task, all our best efforts seem to fail. Nearly 50% of patients stop taking their medications long before they are supposed to. Many take the wrong dose at the wrong time. And many more than we realize don’t even fill their prescriptions. To paraphrase an advertising slogan, we must be doing something wrong.
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© 1981 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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Zola, I.K. (1981). Structural Constraints in the Doctor-Patient Relationship: The Case of Non-Compliance. In: Eisenberg, L., Kleinman, A. (eds) The Relevance of Social Science for Medicine. Culture, Illness, and Healing, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-8379-3_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-8379-3_11
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