While most retailers see a marked drop in walk-in trade during the height of the rainy season, there is one notable exception. The country's 12,000 pharmacies do brisk business in providing symptom-management cocktails for coughs, colds, stomach upsets and other real or imagined ailments, most of which would probably have cleared up by themselves given a little time.
Although these seasonal disorders have helped boost the value of retail drug sales to over 200 billion baht a year, there is another cost that must be taken into consideration.
The indiscriminate use of antibiotics in these "quick fix" symptom-management packages to treat what are usually respiratory viral infections is getting out of control. As they are anti-bacterial, they have no effect on viruses. Resistance develops and antibiotics no longer work when really needed.
Even when properly prescribed by a doctor, these valid courses of treatment are not always completed, creating more resistance. A Mahidol University professor has identified one mutation that is resistant to every known antibiotic in medical arsenals. Britain's chief medical officer has described the growing resistance to antibiotics as a "ticking time bomb" which poses as big a threat as terrorism.
Also expressing alarm is the World Health Organisation, which warns that the overuse of antibiotics and the resulting evolution of resistant bacteria has caused a public health crisis. In the US, the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention says the country faces "potentially catastrophic consequences" if it does not act immediately to combat drug resistance which already kills an estimated 23,000 people a year.
Part of the problem is that while new bacterial diseases have been discovered in the past 30 years, no new class of antibiotics has been developed since the 1980s. This has given rise to the age of the "superbug".
There are other concerns. Fortunately most people make a conscious effort to fend off marketing hype urging them to turn their bodies into a chemical wasteland of ingested pills, liquids, vitamins and food additives.
It is a difficult trend to reverse, since from birth so many have been raised on a "diet" of tablets, capsules and syrups, antibiotics, injections and minor surgery. Popping a pill to ease a complaint becomes, after a while, second nature for some people who forget that over-reliance on analgesics can mask a more serious underlying complaint. Often they reach for paracetamol which causes irreversible liver damage if gobbled like sweets.
There is an erroneous belief in some quarters that a health care professional who "over-prescribes" is doing a good job. Those doctors claim patients expect them to as they then believe they are getting value for money. This multi-pronged approach is also viewed as a type of insurance.The excessive mark-ups for medication at some hospitals exploit this mindset.
The Public Health Ministry believes that Thais take too much unnecessary medicine and shelves have long been cleared of diet pills, strong cough suppressants, tranquilisers, anti-anxiety pills, cold remedies containing pseudoephedrine and any kind of sleeping pill or stimulant.
But it is not enough for the ministry to merely blame the consumer or sales assistant for being irresponsible. It should be creating awareness among the public of simple lifestyle modifications that can ease aches and pains as effectively as any analgesic and forcefully explaining why antibiotic misuse is so dangerous.