Let’s face it. We’ve all done it one time or the other. You know what I’m talking about. That time you took septrin because you had one cough that wouldn’t go away or the time you took antimalarials because you had a fever. That’s right, I’m talking about self-medication.

You might be saying “Yeah, so what? I’ve been doing it and it has been working just fine. What’s the big deal?”
Self-medication is a HUGE problem and because it is so rampant in our society, It is OUR huge problem.
Before I tell you why it’s such a problem, let’s discuss the basics.

What is a drug? Simply put, a drug or medication is any substance, other than food, which is ingested (that is taken by mouth into the body), injected, smoked, inhaled or applied (eg. to skin as a lotion, ointment or patch) in order to cause a change in the body’s normal functions. Dictionary.com defines a drug as “a chemical substance used to treat, cure, prevent, or diagnose a disease or to promote well-being.”

Here’s another thing about drugs your Doctors, Pharmacists and Nurses know and you should know as well: All drugs are poisons. That’s right! All of them. It all depends how much of the drug you take.

In essence, if you take any drug in a large enough amount, it will harm you or kill you.

That brings me to the next thing you need to understand: Dosages. A dosage is the amount of a substance taken to produce the effect we talked about earlier. There are different kinds of dosages. The one’s you should concern yourself with are the therapeutic dose, which is what your Doctor or pharmacist will prescribe to you in order to treat your illness with the smallest possible risk to you, the toxic dose, which is the amount you’ll need to take to start seeing the nasty side of the drug and the lethal dose which will kill you.

What this means is, there is a relationship between the amount of a drug you take and the effect it has on you. We call this the “dose-response’’ relationship.


I’m sure you’ve noticed that sometimes you take a drug, say an antimalarial, and you start to have other symptoms or feel sicker than before. These effects that occur when taking a drug, which are separate from what the drug is actually supposed to do, are known as side effects. In short, this is your medication being a busy body and sticking its nose in what doesn’t concern it.

However, side effects are not always undesirable but that’s something we’ll discuss at some other time. You can now see why the correct dosage of a drug (the therapeutic dose) is important. Some drugs are so dangerous that taking just a little bit more than your doctor prescribes can ensure your untimely demise.

Speaking of prescription, what is a prescription anyway and why is it so important? A prescription is a very sensitive, carefully thought out, set of instructions that a Doctor gives you, through your Pharmacist, on how to take medications that he hopes will make your sickness go away. It is guided by scientific knowledge of what the drugs are intended to do, what else they can do apart from that, what amount is needed to treat the present condition and what the exact risk and benefit is to the patient. It is not made lightly and has far-reaching consequences for everyone involved if a mistake is made.

We will continue in the part B series where we discuss further on this issue.

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