A single fixed-dose combination for all patients is bad medicine

Abstract

It has been proposed that cardiovascular risk could be markedly reduced by prescribing a single daily pill to all patients at risk. This concept is bad medicine, because each constituent has problems, and the problems are different for each patient. A key principle of clinical pharmacology is individualization of therapy. Patients are not all the same, so a single polypill cannot work for all of them. For patients with resistant hypertension, at least 3 different versions would be needed for patients with different causes of hypertension, and even then not one pill would be suitable for all patients.