Self-medication, Self-care orientation, Allied-health students, Non-allied health students, Medicine

Self-medication is presumed to be widely practiced around the world. This can be defined as the use of drugs to treat self-diagnosed disorders or symptoms, or the intermittent or continued use of a prescribed drug for chronic or recurrent disease or symptoms. High level of education and professional status has also been mentioned as predictive factors for self-medication. Students from the allied and non- allied health institutions of the University of Santo Tomas were assessed for the factors of self-medication practices.A total of 66 graduating students were asked to accomplish the questionnaire. To ensure valid responses, the researchers supervised the respondents on accomplishing the questionnaires. Mean and range summarized the age while counts and percentages summarized the gender, school, practice of self- medication, therapeutic classes, health conditions, reasons and sources of self-medication. A total of 55 reported that they practice self-medication. On the total 66 respondents practicing self-medication is antibiotics, anti-allergic and antihistamine, and decongestants. The 55 respondents documented headache to be the most self-treated health condition followed by cough and cold, toothache, muscle pain pimples, back/chest pain, dizziness, and diarrhea/constipation. Significantly greater percentage of females (p=0.038) use antibiotics. Respondents with high self-care orientation are self-medicating on antibiotics (p=0.027), anti-allergic (p<0.001), and herbal medicine (p=0.001) than respondents with low self-care orientation.

Keywords – Self-medication, Self-care orientation, Allied-health students, Non-allied health students, Medicine