Interventions for enhancing medication adherence

This review article brings out the difficulties we face in making our patients take their medications.

Pearls for Practice

• Many reasons exist for nonadherence to medical regimens, including problems with the regimen (such as adverse effects), poor instructions, poor provider-patient relationship, poor memory, patients' disagreement with the need for treatment, or patients' inability to pay.
• For short-term treatments, several quite simple interventions increased adherence and improved patient outcomes, but the effects were inconsistent from study to study, with less than half of studies showing benefits. Current methods of improving adherence for chronic health problems are mostly complex and are not very effective.
• This review is published in cochrane review