Taking Your Medicine: A Guide to Medication Regimens and Compliance for Patients and Caregivers Paperback - 2005

From the publisher

Practical tips for keeping track of your medications

Forgetting to take scheduled doses of prescribed medications can cost you time, money, and future health care problems. But remembering what to take--and when to take it--can be difficult when you have so many important things to deal with on an everyday basis. Taking Your Medicine: A Guide to Medication Regimens and Compliance for Patients and Caregivers is a practical guide to the process of taking medications, presenting helpful tips and simple ideas for patients, family members, and health care providers. Author Jack E. Fincham, named by Drug Topics magazine as one of the 50 most influential pharmacists in the United States, offers effective strategies that help patients help themselves by taking an active role in treatment decisions, following treatment plans, and getting involved when problems arise.

According to a World Health Organization (WHO) report, patients suffering from chronic illnesses who live in developed countries achieve a medication compliance rate of only about 50 percent. In developing countries, the rate is even lower. Whether it's due of a lack of understanding, a lack of motivation, or a lack of concern, the failure to take medication as directed can have serious consequences. Taking Your Medicine: A Guide to Medication Regimens and Compliance for Patients and Caregivers makes taking medication easier, examining organizational, educational, and behavioral impacts on compliance, apprehensions over adverse drug effects and side effects, choosing a pharmacist, specific methods for improving compliance, reasons for noncompliance, considerations in taking medication, and patients' rights.

Taking Your Medicine addresses:

• prescription and OTC drugs
  
• medical conditions affected or caused by noncompliance
  
• generic substitutes for brand name medications
  
• being an informed consumer-10 simple questions for health care providers
  
• dealing with Internet pharmacies
  
• Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA) regulations
  
• online security of medical information and records
  
• interactions between drugs and other drugs, vitamins, herbal supplements, food and nutritional products, tobacco, and/or alcohol
  
• and much more!

Taking Your Medicine includes charts and tables that provide essential information on treatable chronic diseases and acute conditions, common abbreviations and their meanings, common alcohol warnings, potentially dangerous drugs for elderly patients, pharmaceutical companies that offer medical assistance programs for seniors, and Web sites with specific information for senior citizens, parents and children. It's an invaluable resource for consumers who take prescribed medication and for caregivers--friends, family members, or health professionals--who provide them with help.