The conventional wisdom in medicine is almost the opposite: more pills leads to lower compliance. This has been studied and will be studied more the future, since it is an easy source of patents. The term to search for is “fixed-dose combination,” putting two drugs in one pill. Really, how could it be otherwise? It could: adding an “important” drug to a regime of “unimportant” drugs could increase compliance of the “unimportant” drugs. But I think this is most plausible with vitamins. Being in a study might cause that particular drug to get labeled “important,” but I doubt it.
As I said elsewhere on the thread, it is well-known that medical studies increase compliance. The conventional wisdom is a more specific hypothesis that proximity in time to an appointment increases compliance with all drugs, a claim that has consequences outside of clinical trials. I was not able to find any studies of this, perhaps because I don’t know the correct terminology. Compliance is a booming field, especially outside of clinical trials, and I expect that this will be well-studied in the future if not yet.
In other words, it is important to distinguish between the placebo effect and the effect of being in the placebo arm of a clinical trial. The pure placebo effect of placebo vs no drug is very rarely studied.
The conventional wisdom in medicine is almost the opposite: more pills leads to lower compliance. This has been studied and will be studied more the future, since it is an easy source of patents. The term to search for is “fixed-dose combination,” putting two drugs in one pill. Really, how could it be otherwise? It could: adding an “important” drug to a regime of “unimportant” drugs could increase compliance of the “unimportant” drugs. But I think this is most plausible with vitamins. Being in a study might cause that particular drug to get labeled “important,” but I doubt it.
As I said elsewhere on the thread, it is well-known that medical studies increase compliance. The conventional wisdom is a more specific hypothesis that proximity in time to an appointment increases compliance with all drugs, a claim that has consequences outside of clinical trials. I was not able to find any studies of this, perhaps because I don’t know the correct terminology. Compliance is a booming field, especially outside of clinical trials, and I expect that this will be well-studied in the future if not yet.
In other words, it is important to distinguish between the placebo effect and the effect of being in the placebo arm of a clinical trial. The pure placebo effect of placebo vs no drug is very rarely studied.