Survey on prevalence and causes of self-medication in women referring to health centers in Ahwaz, in 2013

Today, considerable advances achieved in different scientific fields have led to an ever-increasing access of people to various medications and their unauthorized consumption, which negatively affects the healthcare and treatment system. Thus, this study was conducted to determine the Prevalence and causes of this phenomenon in the female population of Ahwaz. In this Cross-sectional study364 Women referring to seven health centers in Ahwaz were selected randomly and based on the family medical file number and by proportional distribution to each center and semi-structured questionnaires were completed through interviews. The data were analyzed by Chi square test and logistic regression. P<0.05 was considered significant. Self-medication was observed in 70.1% of women. The most frequent group was those above the age of 30. The most common self-medication case was urogenitaldisorders (58.7%). there was a significant relation between education (p<0.003) and number of births (p=0.003) and unauthorized drug consumption. The most causes for synthetic drug use were previous illness background (48.6%) and high medication costs (50.6%), and about herbal drugs were high medication costs (41.1%), and the effectiveness of these products about medicinal herbs (38.1 %). High rate of self-medication in the studied society necessitates training on proper use of drugs through the use of social media.