Self-medication is a problem that doctors often struggle with because of the health risks. Receiving by any means (oral, parenteral or local) a substance – pharmacological or otherwise – that we do not need is a potentially dangerous practice. The potential for harm exists, regardless of how “natural” the products being promoted are. If nature was 100% safe, we could easily eat any plant on earth, and that’s not happening. Behind the advertising of “natural products” stands a slightly humanized marketing system that mainly strives for economic profit.

I was standing in line to pay my bill at a local pharmacy and once again I saw how the clerk who shipped and collected at the counter “prescribed” a client who consulted him about his mother’s symptoms. The fact that a pharmacist prescribes medication is not new, but it is noticeable that the responsible person/owner of the business premises (after all, pharmacies are just another business) allows this fraud, and there is no body that would regulate it. In this story, a pharmacist told a client that his mother had to take “ex substance” (which was being promoted) all her life, in order to live without the joint pain she suffered from. Faced with this sentence, anyone in a state of desperation and without adequate knowledge can believe what they hear and buy what is proposed.

Lately, you come to any pharmacy to pay and they always recommend products for the liver, memory, circulation, joint pain, aging, stress and I don’t know how many other “diseases”. A pure placebo that serves little or nothing. What our body does not need is usually eliminated in its excretions (be careful where you put your money) or it can accumulate and create toxic effects. The use of certain “natural” products that are promoted to “increase energy” or “improve cerebral circulation and memory,” for example, have been linked to cerebrovascular disease.

Why won’t taking antibiotics help relieve a sore throat?

Do you think self-medication is dangerous or not?

A pharmacy clerk is not authorized to prescribe or even suggest anything related to health. Do they get any incentives for the products they manage to sell? In the meantime, the average citizen should consult a doctor before taking something they don’t know; Particularly vulnerable people should do this because of their age or comorbidities they suffer from. Drug interactions, adverse effects, liver and kidney toxicity are just a few examples of precautions that must be taken into account when dealing with drugs or (purportedly) medicinal substances.

Another common practice, which should be banned and punished, is the pharmacist’s suggestion that the customer change what is written on the prescription for another similar medicine or another brand, “because the other one is on sale”. The one who dispenses medicines has no authority or knowledge to suggest medical treatments, nor to suggest other medical treatments than those prescribed by a doctor. Health authorities should also be concerned about these irregularities. (OR)