In a survey I led of 699 university students in Lahore, nearly two in three (64.9%) said they had taken medicine without consulting a professional in the previous six months. The surprise was not the number itself. It was this: medical students knew significantly more about self-medication and its risks, yet they reported doing it just as often as non-medical students. Knowledge did not change behavior. That gap between knowing and doing is the most important thing our study found.
Self-medication among medical students: how we measured it
We surveyed 466 medical and 233 non-medical full-time undergraduates at Superior University, Lahore, with a mean age of 21.38 years. Everyone answered a structured questionnaire covering knowledge, practice over the previous six months, perceptions, reasons, medicine types, sources, and side effects. The analysis was straightforward: descriptive statistics and cross-tabulations with unadjusted chi-square tests in SPSS 26.
I led this work from the research question through to publication, coordinating the study, supervising student researchers, strengthening the methodology, and shaping the manuscript. I have written before about what supervising student research taught me about research itself, and this study reinforced every one of those lessons.
The numbers that stayed with me
- 454 of 699 students (64.9%) reported self-medication in the previous six months.
- 94.8% of medical students were familiar with the term self-medication, versus 87.1% of non-medical students (p < .001).
- 88.0% of medical students were aware of the risks, versus 72.5% of non-medical students (p < .001).
- Yet practice by discipline showed no statistically detectable association (p = .117). Knowing more did not mean doing less.
- Painkillers were the most common medicines (50.8% of 415 valid medicine responses). Antibiotics accounted for 25.8%.
- Pharmacies were the dominant supply route (81.3%).
- 27.0% reported side effects, with no clear association to educational background (p = .470).
Knowing better and doing it anyway
There is a comforting story we tell in medical education: teach people the risks and they will act wisely. Our data does not support it, at least not here. The medical students in our sample could define self-medication, list its risks, and explain why it matters. Then they went and did it at roughly the same rate as everyone else.
Why? The study points at three forces stronger than knowledge. Convenience: many students described self-medication as quick and effective. Overconfidence: training can create the feeling that you already know enough to skip the consultation. And access: when 81.3% of medicines come straight from the pharmacy counter, the friction between deciding and dosing is close to zero.
This is not a story about bad students. It is a story about how behavior actually works. Information is necessary, but it is not sufficient, and any intervention built on information alone is likely to disappoint.
The antibiotic quarter deserves its own paragraph
One number worries me more than the headline figure. More than a quarter of the medicine responses (25.8%) were antibiotics. Antibiotics taken without guidance contribute to incorrect dosing, delayed proper diagnosis, and the wider problem of antimicrobial resistance. This is where the knowledge-behavior gap stops being an academic curiosity and starts being a public health problem. Pharmacist counselling at the point of sale and real enforcement of prescription rules matter more here than another lecture on definitions.
So what should change?
Our paper argues for a shift in emphasis. Education should move beyond definitions toward safer decisions: concrete alternatives, and clear triggers for when professional care is needed. Universities could provide low-friction consultation pathways, so that seeing a professional is nearly as easy as visiting the pharmacy. And interventions should target convenience and overconfidence directly, not knowledge alone.
Read the findings with their limitations
Honest limitations, because they matter. The design was cross-sectional, so nothing here establishes cause. We used convenience sampling at a single university, which limits how far the results generalize. Practice and side effects were self-reported. The questionnaire was pretested, but we did not report a validation or reliability statistic. Valid denominators vary across items, and our comparisons were unadjusted, with few effect sizes or confidence intervals. These caveats do not erase the findings, but they set the boundaries of what the findings can claim.
The paper
Asghar T, Fatima Q, Shahid B, Sahar I, Asif H, Saeed R. Self-medication among medical and non-medical students: a cross-sectional study at Superior University. Pakistan Journal of Medical & Cardiological Review. 2025;4(3):513-526. Available from: https://pakjmcr.com/index.php/1/article/view/70
A plain-language summary of this study also lives on my research page. This article discusses published research findings. It is not medical advice.
Quick answers
Did medical students self-medicate less than other students?
No detectable difference. Practice by discipline gave p = .117, which means no statistically detectable association, not proof of equal behavior.
What medicines were most common?
Painkillers led at 50.8% of valid medicine responses, followed by antibiotics at 25.8%.
Where did students get the medicines?
Overwhelmingly from pharmacies (81.3%), which is why the pharmacy counter matters so much for any intervention.
