Do As I Say, Not As I Do: Does Medical Knowledge Improve Drug Compliance?

Overview

Objectives/Goals To study the compliance pattern of the most medically knowledgeable and educated group (physicians) compared to that of non physicians. Methods/Materials Twenty subjects- 10 non physicians and 10 physicians were given a week's worth of vitamin D tablets. These tablets were placed in pill containers labelled Monday-Sunday. One tablet was placed in each compartment. Subjects were instructed to take 1 vitamin tablet per day. Results Twenty subjects completed the study. The physician group missed an average of 1.3 pills while the non physician group missed an average of 0.3 pills. Also, non college educated subjects missed an average of 0.4 pills while those who completed at least a college education missed 1.0 pills. Conclusions/Discussion This study was an investigation of factors affecting a serious public health problem-drug non compliance. One major element is the educational level of subjects. Many studies suggest that more educated people lead healthier lifestyles and are as a result, healthier. This study, however, seemed to indicate that higher educational level was actually associated with worse compliance.

Competition history

• CSEF 2012 Behavioral & Social Sciences · Entry J0420

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.

Browse more like this

• All Behavioural and Social Sciences projects
• CSEF Behavioural and Social Sciences projects
• Every CSEF 2012 project