Your Doctor Doesn’t Even Follow Medication Instructions

The next time your doctor tells you to lay off the ibuprofen, it might be because they want more for their own pain relief.
In a new study, passive-aggressively titled “A Taste of Their Own Medicine: Guideline Adherence and Access to Expertise,” researchers from MIT found that physicians and their families are more likely to violate medication instructions compared to the rest of us plebs. “There’s a lot of concern that people don’t understand guidelines, that they’re too complex to follow, that people don’t trust their doctors,” Amy Finkelstein, a professor in MIT’s Department of Economics, said in a press release. “If that’s the case, you should see the most adherence when you look at patients who are physicians or their close relatives. We were struck to find that the opposite holds — that physicians and their close relatives are less likely to adhere to their own medication guidelines.”
Finkelstein and her team analyzed prescription drug purchases, hospital visits and medical diagnoses from nearly 6,000,000 people in Sweden, including 149,399 doctors and their family members. While the general populace only followed medication guidelines 54.4 percent of the time, doctors and their kin were about 3.8 percentage points behind that.
Your Doctor Doesn’t Even Follow Medication Instructions