How often do patients expressly ignore their physicians advice?
They don’t expressly ignore their doctors’ advice very often, but they very often fail to follow their doctors’ advice. About 50 percent of the people told to do something do not complete doing it or don’t do it at all. For example, I just had a small eye procedure and they said, “Take steroid drops four times a day.” For two days in a row I’ve taken them only three times in a row because I’ve forgotten. Lots of things doctors want you to do are trouble, a small nuisance or a larger nuisance. On the larger-nuisance side, for example, once you get past 50 your doctor will tell you to get a colonoscopy. Many of the people who are told to get one never quite manage to get around to it. Doctors call this noncompliance. The noncompliance rates are very high. The other thing is, we don’t know how often people really ignore their doctor’s advice, because one way they do it is just by not showing up. It’s very hard for the doctor to know whether the patient has gone somewhere else, moved or ju
