Increasing of the Self-Medication Level and Its Dangerous - Essay Example

The country has witnessed a situation in which people buy and consume drugs without a prescription from medical practitioners. The danger with this culture is that parents are adopting the culture oblivious of the future behavior that their children will adopt following the use of drugs over the counter. Gup highlights the dangerous approach that parents adopt and indicates that the system “devalues talking therapy” and consequently results into other approaches of treatment, which he calls self-medication and indicates that the society has made this approach “perfectly acceptable.

” Based on Gup’s statement, the society engages in self-medication without assessing the dangers involved in their actions. In effect, children will adopt this practice as conventional or standard practice since their parents make it deeply rooted in a family setting. To highlight the dangers posed by this practice, drug dealing can be said to be a practice that originates from the self-medication that the American social practices. In this regard, the fact that drugs are sold without a prescription can make drug dealing become normal since self-medication is the order of the day.

In effect, I agree with Gup when he indicates that his son’s behavior mirrored the society that the young people grow in whereby “Big Pharma itself prospers from the off-label uses of drugs, often not tested in children and not approved for the many uses to which they are put” (Gup). In this regard, it is evident that large pharmaceutical companies rake in billions of profits each year by selling drugs without proper regulatory measures in place. From this practice, youths who peddle drugs to society behave in a similar way to these pharmaceutical companies since they sell drugs that are illegal and are harmful to society.

It is common knowledge that most behavior that humans adopt is learned from various settings.