Self-medication is very common in both urban and rural communities. The frequency of self-administered drugs among medical scholars in Puducherry was not known. Hence, this design was accepted to assess the frequency of selfadministered drugs among undergraduate MBBS and nursing students. Our study aims to evaluate the knowledge, attitude, and practice of self-medication among medical and nursing students, to compare the self-medication between medical and nursing students, and to evaluate the factors that influence self-medication. A prospective, observational, questionnaire-based study was conducted in which two groups of students were interviewed using a semi-structured pre-validated questionnaire. Ethical approval was obtained from the institutional ethics committee before the initiation of the study. In this study, we found there is a high prevalence of using antibiotics and analgesics as self-medication among medical students when compared to nursing students. This study paves the way for medical students to come forward to understand and reduce the practice of selfmedication.
Keywords: Pharmacology, clinical pharmacology, self-medication, Medical Nursing, antibiotics.
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