#7. “Better patient education” is the answer — but only if the question is “What is the only response made to correct noncompliance in 90+% of cases?”

This is a specific case of Mencken’s observation,

There is no indication that patient education is uniformly the appropriate corrective reaction to noncompliance; there is evidence that patient education, regardless of how well structured the teaching process and how motivated the client, is unsuccessful in achieving compliance in a significant portion of cases.

More information does not necessarily result in more compliance. It is a difficult intuitive leap, for example, to concur with the bureaucratic a priori rationale that providing a patient a three-page listing of a medication’s adverse effects (instead of a one-page list of a subset of those adverse effects) will result in that patient taking the medication more faithfully.

Educating the patient without first determining if education will solve the problem for that patient in that situation is no more rational than automatically prescribing antibiotics to every patient complaining of coughing and a sore throat.

• The Top Ten Patient Compliance Points: #10
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• The Top Ten Patient Compliance Points: #5