[Patient compliance with drug prescriptions. General problem and the special case of rheumatology]

In all branches of medicine, a large percentage of patients do not take the drugs which are prescribed for them. This percentage is situated at about 40%. The authors study this phenomenon in connection with data in the literature drawn from studies with objective controls. Rheumatology does not escape from this problem, whether one considers inflammatory rheumatism or degenerative rheumatism. The authors provide data from a personal series observed in arthrosic patients with an anti-inflammatory drug under trial. The various implications of this phenomenon are briefly discussed.