When you speak of natural born instinct that is what we call self medication around here. It comes with self diagnosis, ability to discover what exactly is wrong and which medication to take. The cost of medicine is not actually financial friendly and we barely have free diagnosis and medication roaming around here, especially in rural areas, so instead of depending on hospital and clinics for medication which usually doesn't come cheap most people just prefer to just figure it out for themselves. Have you ever visited a pharmacist, explaining to him/her that you are experiencing headaches and he/she comes around with a long list of not so cheap drugs just for headaches but then you are like all I want is something cheap and simple.
I mean how difficult can it be for a person to discover they have headaches or fewer, once you are experiencing the symptoms all you have to do is walk to any pharmacy and purchase a drug you feel is best to deal with the symptoms you are experiencing. Unfortunately for most Nigerians only few pharmacist cares about doctors prescription, except if you are trying to purchase a drug that has a history of addiction. The thing about illness and diseases is that its roots might run deeper than the understanding of a regular person without any knowledge of medicine but then such person still go ahead and purchase drugs for self medication based on recommendations from a friend or instinct.
I wouldn't say self medication doesn't work out, it does but it can not be fully relied upon. For some people when they try out a drug or herb and see that it is not really reducing the symptoms they are experiencing, instead of them to see it as an indication to seek help from an health practitioner they just move forward to purchase a drug they believe might work wonders. I wouldn't fault them much, how many Nigerians can afford booking an appointment with a doctor, I mean diagnosis are not actually free around here. What about having to go through the scrutiny of hospitals, especially general Hospitals that puts you on long roll of people waiting for a doctor.
I have depended on self medication a lot of times, though with caution. Any time I'm experiencing headache, I know purchasing a sachet of parastamol will do the trick but if the symptoms persist, I have never been too shy to walk to a clinic or pharmacy with a pharmacist that is capable of giving adequate diagnosis. This attitude of mine didn't just form in a day, there is a way we humans learn from tragic experience and the lessons just sticks in our memory becoming a reminder of possible consequences of our actions.
I would have said fortunate for me the self medication gone wrong didn't happen to me but there was nothing fortunate about it. It all happened during my days in boarding school, we were all a group of kids at the mercy of hostel masters and guardians but the truth is they are not always around and in there absence we are left to look after ourselves, call it survival instinct which happens to be the only thing that keeps us alive especially when we face life threatening situations.
There are all kind of activities we engage in for fun and most of it doesn't always end up with good results. I mean what do you expect from a group of hot headed teenagers still figuring out the limit of their strength? In those days, the most appealing of all the fun activities we engage was football. It usually occur on Saturdays but sometimes during school hours or competitions but the one on Saturday is just different because it only involve the students in the hostel. Since it is during weekends, there is no other student coming through the gate, so we have the whole field to ourselves.
When it comes football, we had a lot of hostel-lite with incredible talents, "hostel-lite" is a name we call ourselves in my boarding school. On the field we display our natural talents, on one of those days we were having our usual football match and one of us fell from a fence and landed on his arm, a student named Opeyemi. We all quickly gathered around him to attend to him, normally we were suppose to rush him to the clinic or inform our hostel masters but knowing that he fell while sitting down on a fence that the school has warned us several times not to, we knew that we will only get him into more trouble and my school doesn't joke with rules. We tried all the self medication we knew and he seems alright and we all went back to playing football.
What we didn't know was that there was more to the arm that we could have possibly imagined. Opeyemi kept going by his regular activities while the pain from the harm persisted but he never informed anyone about it, I guess he was also trying to avoid being punished for sitting on the fence. After few weeks our midterm break came and we all went home. By the time the midterm break was over and we were all back in the hostel, opeyemi didn't resume. After about a week that was when we started hearing news about him.
It turns out that after we went home for midterm break, opeyemi parents came back to school to make enquiries about what happened to their son's arm. It turns out that after opeyemi got home his parents discovered he couldn't stretch his arm fully, the arm has stiffened. They kept questioning him till he eventually disclosed what happened which made his parents furious, came to school and question the school authorities why their son who came to school with full long arms had to come back home with one arm and a half.
The conversation wasn't actually pleasant because when we got back to school the atmosphere in school was different and a lot of us were called in by our hostel masters for questioning and I thank my guardian angel that I wasn't directly involved in the whole self medication that was administered to opeyemi because punishment that was given to those involved was severe. Eventually opeyemi resumed school to finish the term before he was withdrawn from school finally but throughout that time his arm was never the same as it were before the incident.
From my own opinionated point of view, I believe self medication should only be considered as first aid to minor injuries and diseases, it can also be applied to other kind of injuries during emergencies but it is not a perfect substitute for medication carried out in an hospital/clinic by a qualified health practitioner. I think the point when we start considering self medication as a perfect solution for all illnesses or injuries that is when it becomes dangerous with devastating consequences.
This write-up was inspired by weekly featured content titled "Self-medication is important" in hive learners community.
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