Self‐medication patterns among medical students in South India

Abstract

The prevalence of self-medication among medical students is high, facilitated by the easy availability of drugs and information from textbooks or seniors. A significant number of students are unaware of the adverse effects of the medication that they themselves take and suggest to others. Therefore, potential problems of self-medication should be emphasised to the students.

Self-Medication Practices Among Health Care Professional Students in a Tertiary Care Hospital, Pune

“…Even after studying about the drugs and its usage pattern in detail, 30.0% of health care students in our study were not aware of the adverse effect of the drugs which they were using. Also, our study found that 2.0% of the students experienced adverse reaction, whereas, in another study conducted by Badiger et al (only last name of author must be mentioned) in Mangalore, the percentage was 5.0% [15], for which they visited physician or discontinued the drugs. The sources of information in our study were reading books, Internet and family-friends, which when compared to a study by Pragna Patel et al [16] in Gujarat showed similar results.…”

Assessing the Knowledge on Self-Medication Among Medical Students of Bangladesh

“…About 92% of the medical students of both government and non-government medical colleges self-medicate in the past years which matches with the study of southern India [9] and Students at University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. [10] It does mean the self medication is not only an issue of Bangladesh rather a global issue that needs to get the concern of global regulatory author with proper implementation.…”

“…[2] As the result of harm self medication can bring many unexpected and health hazardous states like adverse drug reactions, resistance of pathogens, physical dependence, misdiagnosis, abuse of drug resources etc. [3] About the self medication Pavel et al…”

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“…Hence, the reason for self-medication reflect the same, as in other similar works [21,26,28,32] but contrast with some studies. [33][34][35] Taking medicines both with or without prescriptions and doctor's advice is beneficial provided that a patient is an adherent to one's regimen. In this study, adherence has also been studied among the participants.…”