Prevalence and factors related to self-medication among patients attending the Dental Teaching Hospital, Peradeniya, Sri Lanka

Introduction: Nowadays, self-medication is a common practice all over the world for dental diseases. 
Objectives:  To assess the prevalence and associated factors of self-medication among dental patients attending a teaching hospital in Sri Lanka.
Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted among dental patients who attended Dental Teaching Hospital,  Peradeniya. A self-administered questionnaire was shared among the patients after getting the consent between December 2024 and January 2025. Pretest was done with 20 patients and the modified questionnaire was administered among patients to collect the data. Data were analysed using SPSS version 26.0. 
Results: The sample size was 196. Among them, 115 patients had sought self-medication before dental treatment (58.2% of the females and 58.9% of the males). Of them, 57.7% earned less than Rs 30000 per month, while 60.3% of the patients were in the monthly income category of LKR 31,000-50,000. In the monthly income category of >LKR 50,000, 58.3% of patients used self-medication for dental diseases. Chi-squared test revealed that there was no association of self-medication with monthly income, participant’s educational level and participant’s age (p>0.05). 
Conclusions: More than half of the patients who attended for dental treatment had the practice of self-medication at any point for dental diseases. There was no significant association between patients’ age, gender, monthly income and level of education with the practice of self-medication for dental diseases.