Practices of Self-Medication among Tribal Population North Maharashtra (Khandesh)

Urge of self-care feeling of sympathy towards family members in sickness, lack of health services, poverty, ignorance, misbelieve, extensive advertisement and availability of drugs in other than drug shops are responsible for growing trend of Self-Medication. Aims & Objectives: 1.Prevalence of Self-Medication among tribal people.2.To find out reasons of Self-Medication Most preferred system (pathy) of Medicine as Self-Medication, Common Medications used for treatment of minor or major illness.3.To find out whether benefits weigh higher than adverse effects of Self-Medication. Methodology: A cross sectional descriptive study was carried out in a cluster of villages randomly selected 318 households’ tribal people. Result: The prevalence of Self ? Medication in the sample was 100% with traditional system and 92.14% (293 / 318) with other pathy. Among the households practicing self ? Medication the main reason was economic (100 %) and relief from previous use of same drugs (89.07%).For Traditional practice Ancestors were major source of information (100%) and for other pathy private General - Practitioners was the main source of information. Traditional methods (100%) are used as 1st contact care or 1st line of treatment for any disease and among the people practicing self ? Medication, Allopathy (100%) was the only other pathy to be practiced. The symptoms for which medicines was taken were mostly for fever (93.85%), weakness (89.07%), pain (87.03%) etc. The drugs were generally kept in bags (61.77%) and hanged to the roof which is not of much height and at times in pots (32.08%). Self ? medication was practiced for all members of family ? Infants, children, Adults, Old. Maximum number of people practicing self ?Medication spent 6 ? 10 % (43.68%) of their income on medicines. During the study the commonly observed drugs are antipyretic( 91.80% ), antimicrobials ( 74.06%).Adverse drug reactions which were commonly encountered are gastritis ( 38.22% ), sedation ( 25.93% ).Conclusion: Practice of Self ? Medication was found common among Tribal in North Maharashtra. Well planned, intensive educational programmes may be executed by utilizing professionals from the hospitals which will be beneficial and safe and may help to reduce load on health personnel for minor sickness at least.