You wake up with a sore throat.
A mild fever. A nagging cough.
What's the first thing you do?
If you're like most Indians — you don't call a doctor.
You open the medicine drawer.
You ask the pharmacist next door.
You pop that leftover antibiotic from last month's illness.
And you move on with your day.
This little habit? It might be quietly fueling one of India's biggest public health time bombs.
A fresh 2025 systematic review in the Medical Journal Armed Forces India crunched 66 studies and nearly 30,000 participants.
The verdict?
👉 64.4% of Indians self-medicate.
Two out of every three people. Across cities, villages, incomes, ages.
And the highest culprits aren't who you'd guess:
Education, it turns out, doesn't save you from this habit.
The review found the usual suspects:
Three of those are mostly fine for short-term relief.
One of them is a slow-motion catastrophe.
Antibiotics don't touch viruses. Zero effect on a cold, flu, or most sore throats.
Yet Indians pop them like candy for exactly those things.
Even worse — a 2025 BMC Paediatrics review found 1 in 5 Indian children received antibiotics through self-medication.
Average course length? 2.5 days. Way too short. Just enough to teach bacteria how to fight back.
And India is already paying the price.
An estimated ~300,000 deaths attributable and over 1 million deaths associated with AMR every year. Forecasts say it could hit 2 million Indian deaths annually by 2050.
In his December 2025 Mann Ki Baat, the PM warned antibiotics are "not medicines that should be taken mindlessly."
The Centre also just yanked cough syrups off small rural retail licences — they now need a proper pharmacy.
A start. Not a solution.
The problem isn't just lazy patients.
It's expensive doctors. Long queues. Lost daily wages. Missing specialists in entire districts.
For millions, the neighbourhood pharmacist is the healthcare system.
Dr Prachi Mehtani from AIIMS Rishikesh put it perfectly:
"Medicine is always prescribed for the patient in front of us — not for the symptom alone."
She's already seen patients land in ICU with infections resistant to almost every antibiotic available.
So here's the uncomfortable truth.
Every casual pill today is borrowing from tomorrow's treatments.
Self-care is a right. Self-medication with antibiotics is a public risk.
India doesn't need to stop self-medicating. It needs to start doing it responsibly.
That's all for now!
