DIY medicine

By Samir Sobhi

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There are many disturbing trends in Egypt today. One is the spread of do-it-yourself medicine. Everyone seems to have become their own doctor. Ask the person who has tried the medicine, not the doctor who prescribed it, they'll tell you. Experience is better than formal education, more important than all the latest scientific discoveries, technological advances and pharmaceutical inventions. So goes the current wisdom, as though a new medicine for an age-old disease isn't being discovered with every passing day and as though pharmaceutical companies aren't trying to outrace each other and time.

Is this DIY medical culture, which has manifested in cheap popular paperbacks that tell you everything you think you need to know about ailments of the colon and the liver and about gout, and even about mental illness, malignant or benign?

I say the former. Playing our own doctor is harmful because it entails making decisions about what or what not to ingest into our bodies without having the faintest idea of how our body chemistry works. To this others have responded with equal certitude that it is beneficial. Through those little self-diagnosis and treatment books that can be bought off the newsstands people are getting medical awareness. It also saves time, they say. People no longer have to waste time running back and forth between doctors' clinics. They can cure themselves with an aspirin or sedative or purchase whatever else they need over the counter at the chemists, with or without asking the pharmacist's advice.

All of this to me raises a broader question: How long will our people persist in a way of thinking that is so self-destructive?

This week's Soapbox speaker is deputy editor in chief of Al-Ahram.