FRIDAY, Oct. 21 (HealthDay News) -- More than half of young Norwegian physicians self-prescribe medication, and the practice is more common in the first year after medical school, according to a study published in the October issue of the open access journal BMC Medicine.
Erlend Hem, M.D., of the University of Oslo, Norway, and colleagues studied medical students who graduated in 1993-1994 from all four of Norway's medical schools. They surveyed the doctors at one year, four years and nine years after graduation. A total of 252 doctors responded to all three surveys.
The researchers found that 69% of the doctors self-prescribed at least once during their first year after graduation. By the fourth and ninth year after graduation, 54% of the doctors self-medicated at least once during the previous year.
The most frequently prescribed medications were antibiotics (71%-81%), contraceptives (24%-25%), analgesics (18%-21%) and hypnotics (9%-12%). Individuals with mental health problems requiring treatment were more likely to self-prescribe hypnotics. "These findings suggest that the issue of self-prescribing probably should be addressed in medical school," the authors conclude.
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