Air-Clinic: Dangers of Self Medication - Painkillers

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Today we hear sad stories of about victims of drug abuse or wrong drug usage. Apart from use of hard drugs, self medication is another major contributor to drug abuse.

According to Wikipedia

Self-medication is a human behavior in which an individual uses a substance or any exogenous influence to self-administer treatment for ailments.

One of the major reasons of self medication is ignorance. Most people do not know the implications of of overdose of some drugs especially popular drugs like paracetamol or painkillers. Normally, we all know Paracetamol are used for pains in the body but we use paracetamol whenever we feel the slightest pain. Pains in the body can arise due to some factors like stress or the other type of illness like malaria or typhoid. In the case of stress, relaxation can lead to disappearance of the pains.
Mr. Sam works in a factory as the quality control manager for almost 12 hours a day. After work, he faces heavy traffic on his way home everyday. To ease the stress, Mr. Sam takes painkillers after dinner everyday. Then two days ago, he was rushed to the hospital after he slumped. Unfortunately, he was diagnosed of liver failure due too excess take of painkillers.

According to research by British researchers

The safest thing to do is monitor how much paracetamol you are consuming and not exceed eight 500mg tablets

Another reason for self medication is stereotype. We do not like to visit the hospital because of we believe we can handle the situation. A very popular case is attaching some symptoms to a particular illness. Especially in Nigeria, we primarily attach symptoms like headache, cold and dizziness to malaria, forgetting that so many types of illness show this symptoms. For example, treating a boy for typhoid because he coughs and complains of back ache but actually the boy suffers from tuberculosis. We have a stereotype that every tuberculosis patient must cough out of blood. Coughing of blood might not surface early in some people.

Consult a specialist and stop self medication

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