RULE 2

TREAT YOURSELF LIKE SOMEONE YOU ARE

RESPONSIBLE FOR HELPING

WHY WON’T YOU JUST TAKE YOUR DAMN PILLS?

Imagine that a hundred people are prescribed a drug. Consider what happens
next. One-third of them won’t fill the prescription.^30 Half of the remaining
sixty-seven will fill it, but won’t take the medication correctly. They’ll miss
doses. They’ll quit taking it early. They might not even take it at all.
Physicians and pharmacists tend to blame such patients for their
noncompliance, inaction and error. You can lead a horse to water, they
reason. Psychologists tend to take a dim view of such judgments. We are
trained to assume that the failure of patients to follow professional advice is
the fault of the practitioner, not the patient. We believe the health-care
provider has a responsibility to profer advice that will be followed, offer
interventions that will be respected, plan with the patient or client until the
desired result is achieved, and follow up to ensure that everything is going
correctly. This is just one of the many things that make psychologists so
wonderful – :). Of course, we have the luxury of time with our clients, unlike
other more beleaguered professionals, who wonder why sick people won’t
take their medication. What’s wrong with them? Don’t they want to get
better?
Here’s something worse. Imagine that someone receives an organ
transplant. Imagine it’s a kidney. A transplant typically occurs only after a
long period of anxious waiting on the part of the recipient. Only a minority of
people donate organs when they die (and even fewer when they are still
alive). Only a small number of donated organs are a good match for any
hopeful recipient. This means that the typical kidney transplantee has been
undergoing dialysis, the only alternative, for years. Dialysis involves passing
all the patient’s blood out of his or her body, through a machine, and back in.
It is an unlikely and miraculous treatment, so that’s all good, but it’s not