ABSTRACT
Compliance of the patient with the physician’s pre-
scriptions and adherence to medication is a much-
debated problem in hypertension. Often, physicians
would like to believe that a lack of compliance is the
main reason for therapy-resistant hypertension, and that
resistance to therapy is therefore the patient’s problem.
In line with this, efforts to understand poor blood pressure
control have focused especially on patient’s compliance
with antihypertensive medication and patient character-
istics associated with non-or poor-adherence. On the
other hand, more and more evidence is emerging that
physicians may not be aggressive enough with the man-
agement of hypertension (4). Although physicians seem
to be familiar with guidelines for treating hypertension,
this knowledge is not fully implemented into daily clinical
practice. Nevertheless, lack of adherence by the patient has
been identified as one reason that antihypertensive therapy
is not successful (5,6).
