Abstract
Objective:
Pharmacy students are among the next generation of health-care providers who can promote medical knowledge based on scientific data or low-quality health content. Their susceptibility to popular myths related to health and medicine however threatens the proper selection and use of the best available evidence when dealing with patients in community and hospital pharmacies. The objective of this study was to explore such beliefs held by pharmacy students.
Methods:
A self-administered survey was completed by a sample of 195 Polish pharmacy students (years 1 and 2 as well as years 4 and 5). The students ranked their attitudes towards 36 popular mythical statements on a scale of ‘strongly disagree’ (1 point) to ‘strongly agree’ (5 points). The respondents gave fewer than half the correct answers regarding both general knowledge and more specialised pharmacy knowledge.
Results:
We explore some of the statements that were not influenced by the education process. The important determinants of student susceptibility to myths about pharmacy and therapy were year of study and preferred sources of scientific information, including the language used in these sources.
Conclusion:
More attention should be given to evidence-based medicine skills, including the selection of proper scientific information and the adoption of a critical perspective towards all transmitted information among student pharmacists. This approach would reduce the risk of future pharmacists, as care providers, popularising potentially harmful health myths and misconceptions when educating their patients.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
