Healthy Skepticism Library item: 16518

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: news

Kisiel R
Forgetful patients to be fitted with microchips to remind them to take their pills
Daily Mail (UK) 2009 Sep 22
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1215200/Forgetful-patients-fitted-microchips-remind-pills.html

Full text:

Patients will be fitted with a microchip in their shoulder to remind them to take their medicine, under a new scheme being developed by a drugs company.

Older people will be given pills containing a harmless microchip that sends a signal to the chip in the shoulder when the pill is taken.

But if the pill is not taken by the forgetful patient, the chip in the shoulder will then send a text to a carer or the patient to remind them.

A microchip could let carers know if a forgetful patient has failed to take their medicine
Swiss pharmaceutical group Norvatis is developing the electronic pill that it hopes will reduce the number of patients who have to be supervised taking their medicine.

Joe Jiminez, head of pharmaceuticals at Novartis, said tests of the ‘chip in the pill’ to a shoulder receiver chip had been carried out on 20 patients.

The experiment with a drug that lowers blood pressure had increased the amount of times patients had taken their medicine on time from 30 per cent to 80 per cent in six months.

Drug companies are keen to improve ‘compliance’ rates among patients as most end up not taking their correct dosages because of unpleasant side effects or a failure to gain symptoms quickly.

Medical companies hope it will reduce the number of hospitalisations from patients whose conditions have deteriorated from not taking their drugs.

Mr Jiminez said: ‘This industry is starting to explode.’ He added that his company would have to work closely with medical watchdogs and doctors.

Rival drug company Pfizer recently developed an automated system to telephone patients to encourage them to take their medicine.

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909