The Importance of Adhering to Your Treatment Regimen en español
How do I prepare for success?
If you're looking to improve your adherence—or preparing to start a new regimen—it's important to discuss the fears or challenges you might face with your health care provider. While talking with your health care provider may feel like the last thing you want to do, a good HIV specialist should respond with compassion and possible solutions. Adherence problems aren't something to be ashamed of; they're just one more piece of the puzzle that you and your health care provider are putting together to build the best treatment regimen for you.
There are also a number of simple tips and tools to help you better adhere to HIV treatment:
Tips:
This may sound silly, but you might try using jellybeans or M&Ms first! Think of it as an experiment to see if you can adhere to a treatment regimen. For instance, red jellybeans might represent Reyataz, blue jellybeans might represent Norvir, and yellow jellybeans might represent Truvada. Put 28 red jellybeans, 14 blue jellybeans, and 14 yellow jellybeans in separate jars. Like the real drug regimen, you'll take two red jellybeans, one blue jellybean, and one yellow jellybean once a day, every day. This will give you two weeks of practice, and if there are jellybeans left in the jars after 14 days, you may want to talk with your health care provider about the challenges you faced along the way.
Keeping your meds next to something you use regularly, on a daily basis, can help tremendously. Examples include your coffee pot, your alarm clock or your toothbrush.
Find out if your clinic, AIDS service organization (ASO) or pharmacy has a free program that will call to remind you to take your medications.
Pull out the instruction book for your cell phone. Many phones can be programmed to set off an alarm at various times of the day and night. People may be less likely to ask about your cell phone ringing than if you've set an alarm on a watch or other device.
If you travel frequently, always bring your meds in your carry-on luggage, and bring a few extra doses in case of flight delays and cancellations.
To make sure you're not dealing with any serious drug interactions, have your health care provider do a "brown-bag checkup." To do this, put all of the medications you take—including your prescription drugs, over-the-counter products and your nutritional/herbal supplements—into a paper bag and have your health care provider go through it.
Tools:
One-week, two-week and one-month pill boxes are available to help you lay out your meds in advance. Many people with HIV use these affordable and handy organizing devices.
Some pharmacies will sort out your daily dose of meds and organize and package them in blister packs rather than putting them into pill bottles.
Watches are available that can be set to sound an alarm at multiple points through the day.
If you regularly need to take your meds on the go, check out portable pocket-sized pill cases. Some have alarm clocks built in.
Search for news stories about this topic