Related Experiment Video
Updated: Aug 12, 2026

06:28
E-Patient Counseling Trial (E-PACO): Computer Based Education versus Nurse Counseling for Patients to Prepare for Colonoscopy
Published on: August 1, 2019
A qualitative study of medication-taking behaviour in primary care
Family Practice
|February 24, 1998
Summary
Patient medication adherence is complex, involving patient decision-making and trust in doctors. Understanding how patients test and accept treatments is key to improving medication use.
Area of Science:
- Primary Care Research
- Health Psychology
- Qualitative Research Methods
Background:
- Medication non-adherence is a significant challenge in primary care.
- Existing research offers limited solutions, necessitating a deeper understanding of patient perspectives.
Observation:
- Adult primary care patients' perceptions of medication-taking were explored using Grounded Theory.
- Interviews with 50 patients examined their experiences with 159 prescribed treatments.
Findings:
- A decision-making model emerged: knowledge and trust motivate initiation; patients test medications; users are categorized as passive acceptors, active decision-makers, or rejectors.
- Treatment acceptance is linked to illness acceptance; practical issues play a minor role.
Implications:
- Clinicians and researchers should move beyond 'compliance' to understand patient decision-making in medication use.
- Explicitly addressing the medication-testing process can help patients utilize treatments more effectively.
More Related Videos
Related Concept Videos
The Placebo Effect
The placebo effect occurs when people's expectations or beliefs influence or determine their experience in a given situation. In other words, simply expecting something to happen can actually make it happen.
Dosage Regimens: Designs and Approaches
Designing a dosage regimen, which refers to the manner of drug administration, is a complex process involving the selection of drug dose, route, and frequency. This process is underpinned by pharmacokinetic parameters derived from tests and population averages. These parameters are then tailored to patient-specific variables such as diagnosis, demographics, and allergy status. Once therapy commences, therapeutic response monitoring is critical and achieved through clinical and physical...
Dosage Regimens: Partial Pharmacokinetic Parameters
It is not uncommon for complete drug pharmacokinetic profiles to remain elusive in pharmacokinetics. This necessitates certain educated assumptions by pharmacokineticists to determine appropriate dosage regimens without comprehensive pharmacokinetic data from animal or human studies. One prevalent assumption is setting the bioavailability factor, denoted as F, to 1 or 100%. This assumption caters to the scenario where a drug doesn't achieve full systemic absorption, resulting in the patient...
Therapeutic Drug Monitoring: Affecting Factors
Therapeutic Drug Monitoring (TDM) is the clinical practice of measuring specific drug levels in a patient's blood or body tissues to manage and optimize therapy. TDM is crucial for drugs with narrow therapeutic windows, like warfarin and phenytoin, where incorrect doses can lead to treatment failure or severe side effects. This monitoring ensures the dosage administered is within a safe and effective range. The factors affecting therapeutic drug monitoring include:Patient-Specific Factors:a.
Drug Dosing: Geriatric Patients
Elderly individuals encompass a diverse population with varying degrees of age-related physiological changes. Defining the elderly presents challenges, as the geriatric population is often arbitrarily categorized as individuals older than 65. However, many individuals in this group lead active and healthy lives, with an increasing number surpassing 85 years and falling into the older elderly category. Physiological changes associated with aging impact performance capacity and homeostatic...
Drug Therapy
The advent of drug therapy has profoundly shaped modern mental health care, providing targeted treatments for a range of psychological disorders. Psychotherapeutic drugs, classified into antianxiety, antidepressant, and antipsychotic medications, address symptoms across anxiety disorders, mood disorders, and schizophrenia. While these medications have transformed patient outcomes, they require careful management due to their potential side effects and limitations.
Antianxiety Medications
Antianxiety Medications

