S01:E06
A week after the story of the seven boxes, Izabela goes through her mum’s medicines again. One blister pack — nearly full. A repeat medicine, from a month ago, with three tablets out of thirty taken. And the strangest part: her mum hadn’t forgotten. Asked straight out, she said “that tablet makes me feel off, so I’ve let it go”. She had knowingly tucked the blister away in a drawer.
This episode is about that second, harder case. Not “I forgot to take my medicine” (that was the previous episode), but: why people KNOWINGLY don’t take their medicines the way the GP prescribed. The World Health Organization counted it years ago — with long-term conditions, in countries like ours, roughly half of patients don’t take their medicines as prescribed (Sabaté, 2003).
Tomasz admits that when he was building the app, he thought at first it was a memory problem — that a good reminder would be enough. It isn’t. A reminder only solves one of the reasons. The other four won’t be moved by an alarm.
Five barriers, behaviourally, with no medical verdicts:
The conclusion is an honest one: of these five reasons, the app moves maybe one — the overload-and-chaos one, because it tidies the list and reminds. It won’t soothe fear, won’t patch a tight budget, won’t explain the goal of a treatment and won’t take the shame away. All of that stays with people — the GP, the pharmacist, the family. The app does one thing: it turns a quiet “I didn’t take it” into a list you can see. And what you can see, you can talk about.
At the end, Izabela tells the story of her dad, Krzysztof: for six months he took half the dose of his blood pressure tablet — he’d halved it himself, and nobody knew. It only came out when his medicines were being put into a list for the GP — not through a row, through the list. What happens with the dose next is for the GP to decide, not the kitchen table and not the app.
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About AI in this episode. The dialogue was written by Tomasz Szuster. The voices you hear are AI-generated synthetic voices — not recordings of the hosts. We say this straight out, because we think it should be the standard for any podcast made this way. Full details in the episode outro.
