Is it possible that you have been abusing/misusing drugs? When we hear “drug abuse”, we often think it doesn’t happen in our area. It turns out, it is quite often closer to home than immediately appears.
What is Drug Abuse?
We will restrict the definition to what we want to address, and could you be guilty? Drug abuse is the use of medications without a prescription or not taking medications according to prescription. Let us agree on one thing, all medications are poisons, even paracetamol in the right dose will kill you! We prescribe because they eliminate a disease-causing agent with acceptable damage level if taken at specific concentrations for a specific duration.
“If Symptoms Persists After 3 Days”
When they are being advertised, many over-the-counter medications include the line, “if symptoms persist after 3 days, please consult your doctor”. In practice, most people do everything but that. People can go through several medications before visiting the doctor becomes an option.
What happens is when people get a prescription that is to be taken for a specific period, say, 5 days, on the second or third day of a prescription, the person feels better and abandons the medication, but the disease-causing agent remains suppressed, preventing full compliance.
The Dangers of Antibiotics Misuse and Resistance
People who use drugs as described above have no problem recommending the same medication(s) to people around them who have similar complaints. It is one thing to have a prescription after consultation and tests, it’s a completely different thing to be given one under the “my doctor recommended this one for me last month and it worked like a charm” conditions. Even if the symptoms are largely similar, the causative organisms can be as different as a bacterium and a virus. So, if your antibiotic helped because you had a bacterial infection, the person who has a fungal/viral infection would have zero benefits.
Don’t Do These!
When consulting with patients, Doctors hear all sorts; one patient revealed rather self-importantly, that he had a habit of buying two very common antibiotics and taking them every two weeks just to clear his system of infections! I was aghast hearing this and promptly told him to never do that again. Many young people are in the habit of taking some antibiotics after chance sexual encounters, as pregnancy prophylaxis or because they want to prevent sexually transmitted infections! Please let me say this emphatically, Antibiotics are not prophylactics! So, normalize safe sexual habits, be faithful to your partner, use barrier protection like condoms.
Don’t also take antibiotics because you ate in a new restaurant/Buka or while traveling, it’s more harmful than you realize.
It is these various iterations of abuse that are accelerating the onset of the new health tsunami-drug resistant microbes. Medicine before the discovery of penicillin was very “touch and go” as it concerned infections. Since antibiotics were discovered, it has vastly improved the outcomes for medical interventions. Today, however, that advantage is being eroded by the abuse or indiscriminate use of antibiotics. not completing prescriptions or taking them without prescriptions, increasing the chances that these microbes will develop resistance to existing medications, and that is a truly horrifying thought.
Drug Tolerance
Drug tolerance and in some cases, dependence, is another ugly side of this problem. It is quite common with pain killers and sleeping pills. A lot of people take simple over-the-counter medications like paracetamol for common aches, pains and discomfort. They are intended to soothe and eliminate most of these common complaints. A lot of people who use them simply take more of them when one tablet just doesn’t do it. Occasionally, these people move to stronger pain killers and begin the slippery slope towards dependence and eventually addiction.
So, get a prescription before you take a pill, and if you plan on using a previous prescription, please check with your doctor first. Do not keep pills at home except the basics like a simple pain killer (e.g. paracetamol). Finish the medications as prescribed and stop giving or taking prescriptions from people who are not physicians.
Hygeia HMO covers you for proper medical attention. From consultation to laboratory tests, to medications and also follow up consultations; the whole 9-yards. Click here to buy a plan.
Leave a Reply