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Mom, Take Your Pills - Oh, And Happy Mother's Day

May 14th, 2007 at 11:12 am · Allan Showalter, MD · Ethics · No Comments



The News Release

Source: A Mother’s Day Tip: Encourage Mom to Take Her Medicine as Prescribed

Because I monitor patient compliance issues, I picked up a May 8, 2007 press release from AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals LP that begins

Mom always took care of you when you were sick or injured. This Mother’s Day, return the care by encouraging her to take her medicine as prescribed, reinforce the importance of diet and exercise, and talk with her doctor about her health. The failure to take medication as prescribed by a physician is an under- recognized, under-reported public health issue in the United States. A USA Today article in March of this year reported, “Study after study shows that in the USA and other developed countries, only about half of people with chronic health conditions continue to take medication as directed.”

There follows a description of medication noncompliance, including possible causes and consequences, followed by

This Mother’s Day, talk to your mom about her medicine and encourage her to talk to her physician regularly. Questions patients should consider when talking to their doctors about their medications may include: 1. How often should I take my medication? 2. What are the benefits of taking this medication? 3. How long do I need to take my medication? 4. What are the side effects? If I have side effects, how do I manage them? 5. Are there certain medications I need to avoid? Understanding the answers to these questions, as well as the role that diet, exercise, and healthy lifestyle play in your keeping your mom healthy is the best present that you could give her this Mother’s Day.

References in footnotes complete the press release.


Commentary

Perhaps my discomfort with this message is exacerbated by my own penchant for bringing up the issue of patient compliance at - almost - every opportunity. After all, the facts about compliance in the press release are accurate (and referenced, for that matter). And I love my mother, who takes significant amounts of medication with varying degrees of adherence to her prescribed regimen.

Still, I am relatively certain that my mother would not consider a lecture on patient compliance to be “the best present that [I] could give her this Mother’s Day” - even if I included my all-star, hot shot PowerPoint presentation, replete with bells & whistles.

Further, I am even more certain that this tie-in with Mother’s Day ventures beyond awkwardness and that it, in fact, trivializes rather than promotes patient compliance.

I was annoyed enough to search for other information about this campaign. I didn’t find much about the compliance angle, but did discover a post by Dr. Peter Rost about another Mother’s Day promotion by AstraZeneca. This excerpt summarizes the issue and should prove an enticement to read Dr. Rost’s entire post:

They’ll use Mother’s Day and unabashed selling direct to patients. Kind of like a Tupperware party or Avon cosmetics. Only AstraZeneca will use pink cupcakes to sell cancer drugs directly to patients in chemo treatment rooms.

Dr. Rost thoughtfully included AstraZeneca’s selling plans, labeled for “for internal use only,” which are self-explanatory. [Click on thumbnails to view larger images]




I have nothing to add.

Tags: Ethics