Taking Your Medicine

Medication Aids
by National Institute of Health

(Page 2 of 2)

There are many things you can do to help you follow a medication regimen. Dr. Park has experimented with bottle tops that beep when you need to take your medicine and found them very effective. But until such things are widely available, a programmable wristwatch can be a good reminder. A phone service or computer scheduling program might be a good substitute if you are usually at home when you need your medications. However, for people taking medicines on different schedules, Dr. Park is reluctant to recommend these simple time reminders without something else to tell them which medicine they're supposed to take each time. Pill organizers with a different compartment for various times of the day can help people stick to a schedule.

But often the most difficult part of taking several medicines for an elderly person is simply figuring out what the regimen is supposed to be in the first place. "I think it would be really useful for a health professional to sit down and ask the person to write out a medication plan," Dr. Park says. It's best for the patient to produce the plan, drawing out a day by day, hour by hour schedule of when they have to take all their medications. It could be a grid with dates and times detailing when to take each medicine, along with any restrictions on them. A plan can be in the form of a poster, a booklet, or just a sheet of paper. Checking off each medicine as it is taken can help you make sure you are following the regimen properly.

"Understand as much about why you're taking these things as you can," Dr. Park advises. "That helps adherence." On drugs that are crucial for a person's health, she says, people are generally very adherent, particularly older people. "One of the reasons is that people's lives depend on this, people's health depends on this, and they know it."

The last advice Dr. Park has is to build a consistent, structured schedule for taking your medications into your daily life. "Behaviors become automatic and almost unconsciously performed over time," she says. "For example, you get to your office and realize you have no memory of how you got there. Taking medications can similarly become just as automatic.... Having daily routines that are highly structured leads to greater adherence." For example, you might decide to take one medication after you brush your teeth every morning. Dr. Park thinks that people who have a sudden-onset medical condition like a heart attack tend to have a harder time following a complicated regimen than those whose regimens gradually build in complexity. The latter have had time to slowly build these things into their lifestyles and incorporate them into their daily schedules.

A Complicated Problem

There's no simple solution to helping people follow their medication regimens. Dr. Park says that a number of inventors have investigated designing devices to dispense medications. But the task is extremely difficult because of all the different pill sizes and complicated schedules. "It would need a lot of programming," she says. There are also instructions that might be lost with such a device - to take the medicine with food or drink, for example - as well as warnings, like not using alcohol while taking the drug.

Dr. Park believes that in order to help people follow their medication regimens it's critical to understand how changes in the aging mind affect reasoning, learning and memory. People will be healthier if they understand their own health problems and how to manage them. A spoonful of sugar may help the medicine go down, but if you can't remember which of your medicines to take and when to take them, the sugar's not much help. - a report from The NIH Word on Health, April 2001

Helping a family member follow a medication regime

Some people aren't able to understand why they're taking their medicines and aren't capable of making up a daily plan for when to take each one. These people need a health professional or family member to draw up a plan for them and to figure out a system of reminders. If you have a friend or family member in this situation, try to get them as involved in the process as possible.

In designing a schedule and a reminder system, be creative and keep working with your relative to figure out what will work best for them (see main story for some suggestions). The more they understand about why they are taking these medicines, the more likely they will be able to follow the regimen.

Remember that it's absolutely crucial for pill organizers to be loaded properly. All the planning in the world won't help your relative take their medicines properly if their organizer isn't loaded correctly.

About the Author

NIH is the nation's medical research agency - making important medical discoveries that improve health and save lives. The National Institutes of Health (NIH), a part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, is the primary Federal agency for conducting and supporting medical research.