Self‐medication Patterns Among Medical Students in South India

Perceptions and practices of self-medication in healthcare and nonhealthcare university students in South India

“…These findings are in accordance with reports from other such studies [16,17,28]. Most commonly self-medicated drugs were antipyretics, multivitamins and analgesics, which is concurrent with the reports of Kumar [16,24,28,29]. Nonetheless, studies conducted by Banerjee and Bhadury, Patil et al reported antibiotics to be the most commonly self-prescribed class of drugs [4,17].…”

“…Most of the participants in this study were aware of checking the expiry date of the medication (91.7% vs. 93.8%), which is in concurrence with that perceived by Sudhamadhuri and Kalasker (95.2%) [27]. Reports of some adverse drug reaction experienced due to self-medication were significantly higher in the healthcare group (6.8%) as compared to the nonhealthcare group (1.9%), which is congruent with the value reported by Badiger et al (5.4%) [24]. A greater awareness about drugs and the ADRs caused by them in the healthcare students may result in a higher reporting of ADRs.…”

“…The practice of self-medication was found to be more prevalent in female students (77.4%), which is similar to that reported by Banerjee [4,10,[23][24][25]. This variation in observations may be due to the fact that there were more female participants in the study.…”

Evaluation of self-medication practices among undergraduate dental students of tertiary care teaching dental hospital in South India

“…It was statistically signifi cant among students of different years irrespective of exposure to pharmacology subject. This could be attributed to the white coat, [21] which signifi es the professional look and thus facilitates easy purchase of drugs without prescription. Unlike in some of the developed countries [22] where stringent rules are applied to dispense the drugs, in many developing nations including India it is easier to procure drugs off the counter.…”

Self-Medication Among School Students

“…The problem is now on the rise in developed and developing countries (Badiger et al, 2012). Self-medication is defined as the use and consumption of drugs without a prescription of a provider or without any medical supervision (Zafar et al, 2008).…”