The Perils of Self-Medication: A Cultural Norm
Self-diagnosis and self-medication run rampant in the country. One day, I was visiting a friend, and as soon as I arrived, he was about to leave with his daughter.
“Where to?” I asked.
“My daughter bruised her leg with gravel, so I’m taking her to the clinic for a tetanus shot. I want to avoid infection,” he replied.
“And when was her last tetanus shot?” I inquired.
“Six months ago,” he answered.
“Isn’t a tetanus shot effective for ten years?” I asked, surprised.
“I’m not sure, but what’s the harm in getting it done again?” he insisted.
Seeing the futility in arguing against unnecessary vaccinations, I accompanied him to the clinic.
“Give her a tetanus shot,” he instructed the compounder.
As the compounder prepared the shot, I intervened with a question.
“Aren’t you supposed to ask when her last shot was? Isn’t it effective for ten years?” I queried.
“Um, yes. Then I’ll give her a different shot if it was done recently,” he responded, clearly lacking confidence.
I realized this was just another day in the land where everyone’s an amateur doctor, and as fate would have it, my own father was no exception.
Just a few days later, I was feeling unusually irritable and wound up.
“Everything is getting on my nerves today. I don’t know what’s wrong. I feel an adrenaline rush. I feel like my blood pressure might be high,” I complained to my dad.
“Why don’t you take one of my blood pressure pills? It might help,” he replied calmly.
I couldn’t believe my ears. Here we go again, another day in the land where everyone’s an expert at self-prescription.
Among my circle of friends, whenever someone felt a bit off, there was always a quick-fix medication to recommend, no doctor required. I watched in silent horror as people casually popped pills like they were handing out candy, oblivious to potential side effects. Thanks to the lax regulations in the pharmaceutical industry, anyone could stock up on meds without a prescription, often without a care that they might be masking symptoms of something more serious with their self-diagnosis and self-prescription.
And then there were those who blamed their health woes on the alignment of planets.
“Oh, it’s my Saturn cycle causing these joint pains. Once Saturn moves on, I’ll be as good as new,” one friend’s dad once assured me, as if Saturn was the celestial chiropractor we all needed.
As I reflected on these eccentric yet strangely endearing quirks of our healthcare culture, I couldn’t help but shake my head in amused disbelief. In a world where everyone had a remedy up their sleeve and planetary influences determined our ailments, I realized that maybe, just maybe, the real remedy lay in embracing the comedic side of our medical misadventures. After all, laughter might just be the most underrated prescription for navigating life’s peculiarities—no doctor’s note required.
