Directions for my dicloxacillin Rx: “Take one tablet by mouth every 6 hours 1 hour before a meal or 2 hours after a meal for 14 days.”
According to my time-consuming math, this means I’m supposed to have only two meals a day (unless I schedule “dinner” for 4am) and each time I only have a 3 hour window to eat.
Also, I have to get up after only 6 hours of sleep to take a pill, but then can’t eat breakfast for an hour.
… For 2 weeks.
You cannot tell me people do this successfully.
No wonder patients have trouble taking prescriptions as directed. Especially if they’re prescribed more than one with this particular “we-must-provide-100%-ideal-pharmacokinetics-or-so-help-us-god” militant brand of directions.
I may have a passing grade in pharmacology, but these pills are smarter than me. So I’m sure I’ll eventually ignore the finer details of the directions – which is sad, since I’m a person with tons of free time, supposed higher education, and alleged common sense.
You know, for all the buzz about the alleged ‘convenience’ of prescribing a penicillinase-resistant penicillin in oral form (and I hope you correctly assume that by “all the buzz” I mean “that one comic in Clinical Micro Made Ridiculously Simple”), I’d rather just cart around an IV.
Action Potential 
I just got out a slide-rule.
Try pills at 6A, noon, 6P, midnight. Eat at 7A, 1P, 7P, and have your *fourth* meal at 10P.
Oh, thanks! I guess the problem was trying to calculate it around a 9am breakfast.
I should re-title the entry “Prescription: Take with slide-rule.”
Just imagine being a patient who has to take like 70 pills a day. It’s craziness. Your entire life is constructed around getting your medicine on time, in the proper dosage, with the proper food and weathering the rather horrific side effects. No thank you, sir.
And then when you fail to do it, in part because of your nascent dementia, people start calling you non-compliant. Woo! Aren’t drs awesome?
I might be guilty of having once eaten dinner at 4am. Though in my defense, if I’d had to wait another 2 hours to take something after that, I probably wouldn’t have done so.