The Obligatory Statistical Introduction Waiver
Has anyone read a patient compliance review article that didn’t open with 5-10 seemingly randomly selected statistics indicating the pervasiveness, extent, and negative consequences of noncompliance, including but assuredly not limited to percentage of noncompliance in various patient populations, frequency of noncompliance when it’s a mater of life or death, costs of clinical care, losses in productivity, number of unnecessary outpatient visits and hospital and nursing home admissions, … ?
Has anyone read a patient compliance review article that opened with “Noncompliance with treatment is a trivial issue” or even “Noncompliance with treatment is not nearly as big a problem as we thought?”
I didn’t think so.
So, …
To eliminate wasted time and effort of those performing patient compliance research, wasted paper, ink, and server space of printed periodicals and internet sites that host patient compliance articles, and wasted time and effort of those reading those articles, I propose that henceforth authors of such pieces who believe it essential that they introduce the topic of treatment adherence by providing statistical indicators of the extent and impact of noncompliance be mandated to instead enter the following boilerplate with a link to a standardized index of such statistics.1
You’re welcome.
Footnotes
- I freely confess that I have contributed heavily to these duplicated efforts. I’m very sorry.↩