"Stand on the shoulders of giants"

Just a quick one-off post. In my last post on the Part D optimizer, I was thinking how I'd wished I'd had some references for rates of compliance based on qd, bid, tid, qid, etc. dosing. In general, compliance tends to fall off the more often someone has to take a medication. it does for me, for instance, and I know better, as I mentioned in my Atripla post.

Anyway, I messed about with Google Scholar back a few years ago when it first came out. It wasn't especially useful then, but it seems to have gotten better as its index has grown. In any event, it was nice to find links to extracts of articles dealing with the topic. Most of them related to AIDS — since consistency is so crucial for keeping HIV in remission — but I think the findings can probably be extrapolated to non-HIV-related compliance as well.

Unfortunately most of the databases that are indexed require paid logins to read the fulltext, so it may not be quite so useful to the public at large.

[tags]Medicine, pharmacy, Google scholar, Google, research, science[/tags]