Self medication

In our country, everyone becomes a doctor for himself/herself by themselves. The practice of self-medication has now socially been adopted which seems to be indelible. Many great experts have warned about this peril on national and international basis but we are here to listen none.

Likely, in my home, my mother is our doctor with no doctorate degree. My sister is having a normal cough from couple of days. Meanwhile, my mom handed her some medicines and forced her to take to. I was quite amazed seeing the scenario. It is often observed that people take medicines for flu, fever, headache and other minor disturbing health factors; knowing the fact that these are timely problems for which we should not take medicine at all. We just encourage our hearts and maintain a fake balance by containing cough-syrup, pain-killer, ointments, tonics, vitamins and such similar equipments but we have never pondered over the side effects of these silenced killers.

There are more than 50,000 unnecessarily registered medicines in Pakistan. According to the official reports, 500,000 people die annually in Pakistan due to medication errors, wrong prescription, overdose of drugs, self-medication and adverse effects of medicines.

Asif Murad Umrani

Karachi