What are the disadvantages of self medication

There are many individuals who suffer from diseases like arthritis and tennis elbow. Instead of going to the doctors, often individuals resort to self medications. This can have drastic effect on their health. Some of the disadvantages of self medication are discussed below.

One of the biggest disadvantages of self medication is that you will end up using the medicine which will not heal the disease. You are not a practitioner and hence you will not have enough idea on what will suit you the most. As a result what happens is that many people often aggravate the disease and they go to the doctor at a much later stage. This is the time when the disease has become profound and will be causing much harm for the people. It has been seen that many a time people avoid going to the doctor and start self medication. The disease which could have been treated and cured easily if detected in the initial stages do not get detected and hence the people start suffering from the disease in the future.

The second disadvantage is that often the people neglect the disease in the initial stages and let it develop into a gigantic form. Then treating the disease becomes a problem for the doctors. But many people fail to understand this. The self medications often lead to other health problems and hence this causes double problems for the medical practitioners who end up treating such individuals. The money that the people initially saves by not going to the doctor actually drains out when they have to shell out more to get themselves treated in the later stages from the same disease.

The third disadvantage is often consuming the wrong medicines may make the person paralyzed for life. This has happened in many cases where the patient has resorted to self medication and become paralyzed for lifetime.

Hence it is better to avoid self medication and start going to the doctor for treatment purposes. They are educated in the medical field and they will be able to guide the patients well in the curing of a particular disease easily.