The psychosocial aspects of pharmacological prescription are the factors that intervene in ways of reacting of the doctor and the patient to the prescription of a drug, as well as the role of social structures that determine it. The role of psychosocial factors in pharmacologic treatment of patients remains unclear and is notably absent in the literature of the discipline of general medicine. Biological (specific) and psychosocial (nonspecific) effects of drugs are not simply additive, but interact with each other. In this scenario, this article briefly reflects on 8 main psychosocial aspects of pharmacological prescription: 1) Compliance; 2) The doctor-patient relationship (the doctor as a drug in itself, the placebo and nocebo effect); 3) The Hawthorne effect (which occurs in addition to the placebo effect); 4) Regression to the mean; 5) Complacency effects (confirmation bias and prescription for complacency); 6) The dependence of the pharmacological prescription (model “consumerist” and “Generation meds”); 7) Influence of the pharmaceutical industry on prescription practices (commercial strategies that present corporate bias); And 8) Cost concerns.

Medication adherence; Illness perceptions; Medication beliefs; Communication; Patient Compliance; Physician- Patient Relations; Psychosocial effect modifiers; Placebo; Family Practice; Prescription Drugs/adverse effects; Prescription Drugs/ economics