18-6
Health workers need to look at these things carefully. Student health workers
may not realize how great the temptation can be to give medicine needlessly. It
helps to invite experienced health workers to talk with those in training
about the difficulties and obstacles they have run into.
Experienced health workers can help prepare
health workers-in-training for the difficulties and
disappointments they may encounter in their communities.
3. Trying to solve the problem
During training, a number of steps can be taken to discourage the misuse and
overuse of medicines:
• Set a good example. Program doctors, nurses, and instructors, when attending the
sick, should take great care to use medicines only when needed. Encourage the use
of helpful home remedies. Whenever anyone gives medicine as a substitute for caring,
point this out and discuss it in class.
• Through role plays and sociodramas, students can explore the pressures and
temptations to overuse medicines, and ways to resist them. Imaginative teaching
aids (such as the antibiotic learning games in the next chapter) also help health workers
discover the need for cautious, economic use of basic medicines.
• Health workers can help demystify the use of modern medicine by .. .
looking things up in their book, together with the sick person’s family (see p.
Part Threes-4),
explaining the risks of taking specific medicines-especially for children and
pregnant women, and
helping people appreciate the scientific value of useful home remedies (see Ch. 7).
• Health workers can help organize community groups to perform short skits or plays
showing problems that result from local misuse of medicines (see examples on pages
27-3 and 27-14).
• Health workers can visit storekeepers who sell medicines. Help them learn more
about these products. Encourage them not to sell harmful or overpriced medicines, to
explain uses, dosages, and risks, and to suggest that people buy nutritious foods rather
than costly vitamins, cold formulas, and cough syrups.
• Help people to become aware of how much they spend on medicines and why,
and to look for low-cost alternatives. (For example, see Where There Is No Doctor,
p. 46, Healing with Water.)