Prevalence of self-medication for skin diseases: A systematic review

Self-medication is the selection and use of drugs without medical prescription,to treat diseases or for symptomatic relief. this article is a systematic review on self-medication in skin diseases. a search was conducted on virtual health library and pubmed databases using predetermined descriptors. two researchers performed the article selection process independently,with the degree of inter-observer agreement measured by the kappa index. the prevalence of self-medication ranged from 6.0 to 45.0%. topical corticosteroids were the most commonly used therapeutic strategies for self-medication,as found in the reviewed articles. this study revealed that published data on self-medication in dermatology are scarce,although the findings showed that it was a common practice. © 2014 by anais brasileiros de dermatologia.