The best doctors and medicine in the world can't save you if you don't do what you're supposed to do.
Dr. Jasper didn't care if they got their checkups, their medications.
There has been treatment for hepatitis C, but the treatment has not been overwhelmingly effective, number 1. And number 2, it has had considerable toxicity.
Drugs don't work in patients who don't take them.
I am quite sure that a good number of "cures" of psychotics consist in the fact that the patient has decided, for one reason or other, once more to play at being sane.
If a person is treated like a patient, they are apt to act like one.
About half of all people don't take medications like they're supposed to.
Yesterday, Attorney General John Ashcroft had surgery to remove his gall bladder. Doctors say the surgery was difficult because Ashcroft refused to take his clothes off.
"There are one or two elementary rules to be observed in the way of handling patients," he remarked, seating himself on the table and swinging his legs. "The most obvious is that you must never let them see that you want them. It should be pure condescension on your part seeing them at all; and the more difficulties you throw in the way of it, the more they think of it. Break your patients in early, and keep them well to heel."
Dissections daily convince us of our ignorance of the seats of diseases, and cause us to blush at our prescriptions. How often are we disappointed in our expectation from the most certain and powerful of our remedies, by the negligence or obstinacy of our patients! What mischief have we done under the belief of false facts and false theories! We have assisted in multiplying diseases. We have done more — we have increased their mortality.
One reason for high health care costs is that patients fail to follow their treatment regimen.
Keep a watch also on the faults of the patients, which often make them lie about the taking of things prescribed.
It has oft been said that physicians make the worst patients, but it is the opinion of This Author that any man makes a terrible patient. One might say it takes patience to be a patient, and heaven knows, the males of our species lack an abundance of patience.
As a clinician, I would never want to be coercive in relation to a patient, nor do I harbor the illusion that as a physician I am capable of forcing someone to change their behavior, no matter how detrimental to their health.
There are more than 9,000 billing codes for individual procedures and units of care. But there is not a single billing code for patient adherence or improvement, or for helping patients stay well.
We know that if you just were to take the drugs that you were supposed to take for diabetes or hypertension, just take it, as opposed to not take it, we could save $7,000, $3,000 per patient per year.
If I have any message for others, it is to go for help early and not to be a resistant patient.
You'd believe that a patient with hypertension, if you know you have hypertension or diabetes, you would take your drug every day. The compliance rate is more like 30% or 40%. Which means that 60% of patients don't take their drugs, and they actually go into these crises, end up in the hospital.
