by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
Dr. Lisa Rosenbaum writes in the New England Journal of Medicine about a friend who is worried about her father since two of his sisters have recently died following strokes. She asks her friend:
“Is he on aspirin?”
“Oh, heavens, no,” the friend replies. “My parents are totally against taking any medications.”
“But why?”
“They don’t believe in them.”
Curious about what she calls this instinctive non-belief, a commonly observed reluctance to take the medications their physicians recommend (aka non-compliance or the slightly less patronizing non-adherence), Dr. Rosenbaum wanted to understand how patients feel about taking cardiac medications. The consequences of not taking one’s meds can be deadly, yet almost half of all heart patients are famously reluctant to do so.(1) Dr. Rosenbaum, a cardiologist at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, wondered: Are there emotional barriers? Where do they come from? Can we find better ways of increasing medication adherence if we understand these barriers?*
So she interviewed patients who’d had a myocardial infarction (heart attack) – first at the time of the initial cardiac event, and again months later. Their answers fell into five distinct themes that might be surprising to doctors feeling frustrated by their non-compliant patients. Continue reading ““I’m just not a pill person” – and other annoying excuses”