Prevalence and Pattern of Self-medication with Alternative Medicine: Treatment-switch Analysis in Oral Submucous Fibrosis Patients.

AIM: The aim of this study was to investigate prevalence and pattern of self-medication with alternative medicine (ALM) among oral submucous fibrosis (OSF) patients with emphasis on treatment-switch analysis. METHODS: A total of 115 OSF patients were recruited and subjected to scientifically validated questionnaire. Two groups were identified: S-ALM: patients who have previously received modern medicinal treatment but switched to ALM; and DN-ALM: patients who started ALM from De Novo. RESULTS: A total of 37 (32.18%) patients reported use of the ALM at some point of time. Twenty-five (67.56%) switched to ALM, whereas 12 (32.43%) patients used ALM from De Novo. The pattern of switching to ALM in short period was significantly prevalent in patients with advanced stages (stage III and IV) as compared to early stages (stage I and II) of OSF. Clarified butter, glycerin, and honey were the most commonly used ALM in both the groups. The most common reasons for switching to ALM were the cost of treatment (32.00%), longer duration of medicinal treatment (24.00%) and ineffectiveness of the medications (24.00%). CONCLUSIONS: ALM usage is common in OSMF patients with significant percentage of patient switched from modern medicine to ALM. Therapeutic efficacy of ALM in OSF needs exploration in future.

Development and validation of oral health-related quality of life measure in oral submucous fibrosis.

OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to develop and assess the validity and reliability of disease-specific oral health-related quality of life (OHRQoL) instrument for oral submucous fibrosis (OSF). MATERIALS AND METHODS: Items for the OHRQoL-OSF were generated from personal interviews and focus group discussions, the existing questionnaires, reviews of literature and inputs from expert's panel. Item reduction was performed by clinical impact method followed by pretesting of the developed questionnaire. The validity and reliability of the instrument were then examined. RESULTS: Forty-five items were generated from qualitative data and item pooling from various sources. After item reduction, 17 items were finalized with four domain-structure having Eigenvalues greater than 1. OHRQoL-OSF was shown to be valid in distinguishing patients with varying degrees of OSF severity. For the concurrent validity, the observed impact of OSF based on OHRQoL-OSF significantly correlated with Oral Health Impact Profile and global self-ratings of oral health and overall well-being. OHRQoL-OSF and all its domains demonstrated good internal consistency reliability with Cronbach's alpha ˃0.7 and excellent test-retest reliability (ICC = 0.96). CONCLUSION: The first disease-specific OHRQoL-OSF instrument appeared to be highly reliable and valid measure for assessing impact of OSF on life quality.