Pill counts are considered the gold standard for assessing patient compliance with medical therapy.

The claim states that pill counts are the 'gold standard' for assessing medication compliance. However, multiple recent systematic reviews (e.g., Papers 0 and 3) explicitly state that there is no single gold standard or accepted reference tool for measuring medication adherence. Instead, researchers rely on a wide variety of subjective and objective measures, such as self-reports, pharmacy refills, electronic monitoring, and biological assays. Therefore, the claim is refuted by current literature.