Comment This would be trememendous (Score 1) 145
I spent the past year and a half as a case manager for people with severe mental illness and HIV, and the biggest problem with HIV meds is compliance (psych meds, too, but the results are potentially less lethal w/ the psych meds). Once you go on meds you need to be 90% compliant for them to work reliably. If you go off then you are burned to those meds, those drugs will be ineffective for your treatment as you now have a resistant strain of the virus (In fact, how quickly HIV turns to AIDS is now thought to be correlated with how many different strains of the virus you've been re-infected with).
The specific population I was working with was African American women, which is a caretaker population (ie, they have people in their lives they need to take care of). We spent a lot of time reminding them that they HAD to make time to take care of themselves every day instead of their children, otherwise they wouldn't be around to take care of themselves. It can be a difficult case to make when their child has had two asthma attacks in one day and they have to go to a clinic or an ER to get them looked at. I believe if you added a regular sensory input (sound and light) it would help ingrain the habit of taking meds, to the point that when someone is running out of the house to get their kid to the ER, they might think "Oh, that darn buzzer is going to go off. I should grab my pill box".
Its an abstract concept which not everyone is equipped to deal with easily, that there is an invisible thing in your blood that is so lethal that you have to take time out to address it three times a day. Its especially easy to put it to the side when you have friends that tell you not to trust your white doctor, that pharmaceutical companies are getting rich off your illness, and the side effects of incontinence are so bad that you don't want to leave the house. Most of my clients didn't argue with the fact that they should take their medication. They all said they knew they had to, but with all those and other variables, people are pretty well primed to forgive themselves if they forget a dose. So we spent time with them on ways to remember taking your meds (attaching a note to your toothbrush, sticking a note to your front door. I even programmed the calendar on some of my client's cell phones for them). And those strategies helped.
Most people know they have to take their meds, just like most people know they need to work out, know they need to avoid fatty foods. Behavioral interventions like this aren't a panacea, but they help eliminate one of the very real factors in non-compliance. I know it would have made my job easier.
The specific population I was working with was African American women, which is a caretaker population (ie, they have people in their lives they need to take care of). We spent a lot of time reminding them that they HAD to make time to take care of themselves every day instead of their children, otherwise they wouldn't be around to take care of themselves. It can be a difficult case to make when their child has had two asthma attacks in one day and they have to go to a clinic or an ER to get them looked at. I believe if you added a regular sensory input (sound and light) it would help ingrain the habit of taking meds, to the point that when someone is running out of the house to get their kid to the ER, they might think "Oh, that darn buzzer is going to go off. I should grab my pill box".
Its an abstract concept which not everyone is equipped to deal with easily, that there is an invisible thing in your blood that is so lethal that you have to take time out to address it three times a day. Its especially easy to put it to the side when you have friends that tell you not to trust your white doctor, that pharmaceutical companies are getting rich off your illness, and the side effects of incontinence are so bad that you don't want to leave the house. Most of my clients didn't argue with the fact that they should take their medication. They all said they knew they had to, but with all those and other variables, people are pretty well primed to forgive themselves if they forget a dose. So we spent time with them on ways to remember taking your meds (attaching a note to your toothbrush, sticking a note to your front door. I even programmed the calendar on some of my client's cell phones for them). And those strategies helped.
Most people know they have to take their meds, just like most people know they need to work out, know they need to avoid fatty foods. Behavioral interventions like this aren't a panacea, but they help eliminate one of the very real factors in non-compliance. I know it would have made my job easier.
