Medication – follow your prescription to the letter

[8 March 2010 - 12h14]

Tablets you forgot to take, syrup you can’t “get down” because it’s too bitter… There are any number of good excuses for not taking the medicine your doctor prescribes. And yet a prescription is exactly that – it requires you to take it.

In fact, it’s essential that all medical prescriptions are carefully followed. This means that you must not stop a course of treatment you have embarked on it but nor must you exceed the doses prescribed. Such practices – which specialists refer to as non-observance – can become virtually suicidal when they concern long-term treatments … to combat high blood pressure, diabetes and high cholesterol, for example.

To take another example, let’s look at asthma. According to the WHO, each year across the world, asthma kills around 180,000 people. And the majority of these deaths appear to be directly related to poor drug observance! This is a massacre of which patients are insufficiently aware.

But not taking medication correctly also means the risk of reduced effectiveness, therapeutic failure, undesirable effects, etc. The risks are numerous. Not to mention antibiotics which, if stopped before the doctor advises, contribute to the emergence of germs that are very difficult to combat.

More worryingly still perhaps, a number of studies reveal a “deep gulf” between patients and healthcare professionals. Too often patients do not really understand the effectiveness of the medication. And so they refuse to have anything to do with it! This is where the central role of the doctor and pharmacist in monitoring observance of treatment comes in. Only an in-depth dialogue between doctor and patient and pharmacist and patient will enable the latter to derive the best possible benefit from his medication.

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