My post, It’s Time To Stop The Damage Caused By Today’s Patient Compliance Paradigm, went online at the eyeforpharma.com site today.
While fundamentally a summary of the preceding posts on this blog, 1 It’s Time To Stop The Damage Caused By Today’s Patient Compliance Paradigm can claim an original introduction, which, I think, is worth sharing here:
Imagine that, say, a well known Fortune 500 manufacturer of state of the art medical devices and the Feds co-funded a $14.2 million multi–center study at four prestigious universities to determine the effectiveness of a newly designed stereotactic laser bloodletting* machine (with optional Facebook connection) in treating diabetes.
Doesn’t it seem likely that a whistle-blower – or, failing that, a Senator coming up for re-election, an investigative reporter desperate for a story, a publicity-seeking Attorney General of one state or another, a gadfly shareholder, a do-gooder looking for a cause, or a Ralph Nader wannabe – would be loudly decrying the use of public and shareholder monies on a clinical trial of a treatment never shown to be of benefit to patients with this disease despite many, many years of use? One would, in fact, think that congressional committees would be convened, newspaper stories written, blog posts posted, accusations leveled and denied, indictments brought, damage control instituted, scapegoats designated, and heads rolled.
At the least, the medical device company, the Federal agency that handed over the bucks, and the academic institutions involved would be called upon to justify their choice of investments, i.e., explain why the limited amount of money and skilled researchers were designated to be expended on this project instead of a potentially effective therapy – or at least one that has not already proven useless.
I contend that the now dominant paradigm of adherence to treatment, has, like bloodletting, been so unsuccessful for so long (see previous posts: The Tragedy Of Patient Compliance and Patient Compliance – So Wrong For So Long) that continuing to explore the same familiar primrose paths of the patient compliance model entails an intellectual responsibility to provide an explicit rationale for taking this tack.
Next: Alternatives To the Current Patient Compliance Model
The posts in this sequence have thus far focused on the why the treatment adherence paradigm is ineffective and the danger of its continued use.
As noted already, the next entries will begin a discussion of possible alternatives to the current model.
__________