Taking Your Medicine: A Guide to Medication Regimens and Compliance for Patients and Caregivers, 2nd Edition
Synopsis "Taking Your Medicine: A Guide to Medication Regimens and Compliance for Patients and Caregivers, 2nd Edition"
This book will provide you with some simple ideas that can easily be implemented to help you or those you care for. You may be reading this book to help yourself be compliant, or you may wish to help a loved one (spouse, child, parent, or grandparent) better comply with prescription instructions. This book will give you tips that you can use right away to become more compliant in taking medications. If you or someone you take care of or care for has trouble remembering to take scheduled closes of prescribed drugs, you or they are not alone. Taking drugs on a regularly scheduled basis is a difficult task. Many things occur in our lives that divert our attention to other pressing matters. In fact, 50 percent of us are noncompliant with prescription instructions at some point. It is so easy to be critical of ourselves or others that have trouble with taking medications as scheduled, but be gentle. Many times, the dose starting and frequency of administration of drugs can be confusing.This book is written to help you better understand the process of taking medications and to help you or someone you care for learn how to be compliant with drug regimens. It is sometimes difficult to be compliant with medications because you have so many other important things to deal with on a day-to-clay basis. However, medication compliance can save you time, money, and future health care problems. Health providers are critical of patients who do not comply with regimens. The words used to describe those of us who are struggling to take medications as prescribed include:•noncompliant•noncooperative•deviant•forgetful•non-adherent We all need to worry less about labeling patients and more about helping understand and solve the problem of medication noncompliance. I vividly recall asking a woman in her nineties about her drug taking and compliance behavior. I wanted to find out how and when she became noncompliant with her blood· pressure medication. I asked: "When did you take your medications today, and did you for get to take some of the closes?" Her reply was swift and insightful: "Listen, how can you expect me to know about something I forgot to do in the first place?" What a great answer this was-one that embarrassed me more than a little. The lesson learned was simple: rather than blaming them for not being compliant, learn to help patients learn how to help themselves become as compliant as they can be. Anything that we do to improve compliance will rarely be 100 per cent successful. However, most things that we do to become more compliant can improve our health. That is the goal of this book-how to help you and yours become healthier by making the medication taking easier and thus making it easier to be compliant with drug regimens.Within the chapters, key points summarize important factors to consider when you take or give medications. These points can pro vide immediate help to you and your loved ones as you try to comply with medication schedules. An appendix at the end of the book provides specific Web site and further drug-related information for seniors, drug-related information for parents and children, and a listing of numerous Web sites containing information about drugs for all age groups. The tips included in this book hopefully will provide you with some definite actions to take right away to improve your health. You are the most important person in the health care system, and you are the person this book is written for. Let us start today to be healthier by helping ourselves as much as we can with the drugs that we take.
