Methods of improving patient compliance in chronic disease states.

Patients with chronic diseases fail to comply with the regimen prescribed by the physician for a variety of reasons. Physicians must be aware of the likelihood of noncompliance in the individual patient and make strong efforts to detect problems and persuade patients with the importance of adherence to a program designed to reach and maintain stated, and often negotiated, therapeutic goals. It is the physician's responsibility to teach, motivate, and strengthen the patient to maximize compliance in a largely unsupervised setting. This can best be accomplished by a process of "therapeutic partnership."