A Study on the Evaluation and Impact of Self Medication Practice Among the Pharmacy Students

Aim: To evaluate the impact of self medication practice among the pharmacy students of Andhra Pradesh in this study. Materials and Methods: This was a prospective study conducted among the pharmacy students by using the questionnaire which was circulated by means of Google forms to various pharmacy colleges located in Andhra Pradesh, India. Students from the pharmacy colleges with both the genders of all age groups were included and students other than pharmacy stream were excluded from the study. Results: In this study, a total of 473 pharmacy students were involved in order to evaluate the impact of self-medication practice among them. Most of the study participants used self-medication for headache (52%) followed by fever (38.3%) and cough (25.6%). Majority of the study participants used the drug paracetamol (78%) followed by cetirizine (38.9%) and multivitamins (25.8%) as self-medication. In this study, almost half of the study participants (48.4%) have searched the internet for selecting the drug for self-medication as most of the study participants were from urban areas. Most of the study participants always used to check the prescribing the information before self-medicating themselves (75.1%). Conclusion: Searching the treatment strategies for specific medical conditions over the internet was becoming a common phenomenon in the present generation. Responsible utilization of the self medication definitely results in positive outcomes. Hence, students should have the awareness in the aspects of rational drug usage while practicing the self medication.