This Article  • References  • Full text PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in this journal  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

John F. Steiner, MD, MPH
Denver, Colo

Arch Intern Med. 1995;155(3):335-336.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

Recently, Broers and colleagues¹ reported that injecting drug users were as compliant with zidovudine as patients with human immunodeficiency virus infection in other risk groups.¹ The investigators chose two compliance measures for their study: estimation of compliance by the physician treating the patient and the rise in mean corpuscular volume (MCV) of erythrocytes.

Numerous studies over the last 30 years have compared physician assessments of compliance with objective measures such as pill counts or electronic medication monitors and have demonstrated that physicians are inaccurate judges of their patients' compliance.^2-6 In these studies, the sensitivity of physician judgments of reduced compliance has ranged from 30% to 65% and specificity from 43% to 68% (likelihood ratios, 0.9 to 1.1).³ Product-moment correlations (Pearson or Spearman r) between physician estimates and compliance as measured by pill counts or electronic medication monitors have ranged from 0.01 to 0.48.^24"6 Physicians have . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?