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It may be due to financial reasons or the time it takes to have a medical check- up was among the reasons why people would rather choose to self-medicate and with some of the medicines readily accessible to people even without prescription from a health expert, it further encourage people to self-medicate if it means that they can relieved of their pain a little more faster. Most of the times, self-medication is a safe procedure that can prevent some common illness in becoming a more serious one such as by treating common cold, you can reduce the possibility of getting flu but there are also some dangers that people can suffer by overly relying on self-medication and I will explain some of those dangers within this post.
Beginning with the most obvious, "self- medication can lead to incorrect diagnosis of the illness" and as a result, we are just making it worst by delaying its treatment. There are also times that instead of the actual illness, the thing that the medicines that we drink has treated was only their symptoms, making us think that we are already cured to only feel sick again after some time. In fact, we just became a witness of this event happening in mass during the Covid-19 pandemic. As the symptoms of Covid was very similar to a flu, many people have tried to self- medicate by drinking flu medications and as they think that they were already cured, they begin to socialize again, resulting for the virus to spread all over the world. And even when the time that Covid has become widely known, many people would still try to self- medicate by drinking Antibiotics or resorting to herbal medicines. There was even a time when people would inject disinfectants in their body and ended up in the hospital when the thing that they should do is to just self- isolate for a couple of weeks.
Another danger of "self-medication is not having the appropriate dosage" so even when a person was drinking the right medicine, it does not taken any effect since the dosage is too low while having an overdose can result on much further complications. I have seen this thing happening before on my ex partner which is suffering from Insomnia. We are on our way sending her on her home when suddenly, she suddenly becomes dizzy and have difficulty to breathe and when we go to the hospital, the doctor says that it was the result of her having an overdose on sleeping pills. Apparently, the sleeping pills that she's drinking was losing its effect as her body builds a tolerance to it but instead on consulting a doctor for a different sleeping pills, she decided to increase the dosage of the sleeping pills which could have ended really badly if it was not prevented.
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The last risk of self-medication that I could think of was the chance of "an adverse reaction due to drinking different medicines". Depending on a medicine, a person can already experience some side effects but its effects can be further amplify if it was mix together with another medicine that it wasn't supposed to be drink together. We should remember that many of the medicines that we use today are made with different chemicals and sometimes, when they interact in our body results on serious side effects as this medicines are not meant to be drink together.
Despite this risk, people would still resort on self- medication given how expensive it could be to be check- up by a doctor but sometimes, because of this thinking that we ended up more sick and spend more money.
Thank you for reading my post and see you on the next one!
