A COMPARATIVE, QUESTIONNAIRE BASED CROSS-SECTIONAL STUDY ON SELF MEDICATION PRACTICE AMONG MEDICAL AND PARAMEDICAL STUDENTS

Background: According to World Health Organization (WHO), self medication is use of medicines to treat self recognized symptoms, or use of a prescribed medicine for chronic symptoms. It is associated with use of prescription drugs, alternative medicines and over the counter drugs (OTC). Methods: This was a prospective, observational, questionnaire based study where two groups of students were interviewed with a prevalidated questionnaire. The first group comprised of students from MBBS while the second group consisted of students of paramedical courses namely physiotherapy, operation theatre technicians and lab technicians. Results: A total of 200 students with an average age 19.62±0.65 years participated in the study. Among these students, 100 were medical students. All the students had practiced self medication however, only 51.00% agreed with the concept of self-medication. Considering the significant „p‟ value to be <0.05 there was a significant difference among the 2 groups with respect to awareness of generic and brand names of the drugs and importance of completing the course of treatment. 51.00% of medical and 29.00% paramedical students were aware about generic and brand names of drugs while knowledge about importance of completing course of treatment was present in 62% medical and 42% paramedical students. (p value<0.05). Also, there was no significant difference regarding the knowledge about the content, dose, duration of treatment and frequency of drug administration among the two groups. Conclusion: The present study shows a high prevalence of selfmedication among medical and paramedical students of the institution. The knowledge about self-medication was encouraging among the students of both the groups. Keywords: Self medication, student, knowledge