Commentary

Lack of patient compliance with prescribed regimens is an important and fascinating problem in medical care. Its distressing magnitude in virtually all outpatient senings 33 makes consideration of noncompliance mandatory for all serious medical conditions for which efficacious self‐administered treatments are available. Unfortunately, attempts to understand noncompliance (the better to contral it) have revealed its complexity without yielding much useful information about its management. To make matters worse, the complexity to which we have alluded seems to have resulted in both confusion about or inattention to what is actually known and misleading or inaccurate claims about that which is not. This has certainly been the case with respect to the relationship of the therapeutic regimen to compliance. One can hardly avoid encountering a manufacturer's claim that a product will promote compliance