AI medicine-awareness bot worked — but only in English, the one language most of the people I built it for can't read. Here's the problem, the one-day sprint to fix it, and how GitHub Copilot got me through it.
GitHub Finish-Up-A-Thon submission. I shipped this project months ago, but it was never truly finished — it was missing the one feature that decided whether a real person in my own community could use it. This challenge was the push that made me sit down and close that gap in a single night.
The problem we face
In India, you can walk into most pharmacies and buy prescription drugs without a prescription. We've quietly normalized something genuinely dangerous, and the research is blunt about it.
A simulated-patient study in Bengaluru sent two researchers into 261 pharmacies with fake symptoms. Antibiotics were handed over without any prescription at roughly two-thirds (66.7%) of them. Not a single pharmacy warned about side effects. Only about one in five even mentioned that a doctor's prescription was needed. The "guidance" most people walked out with was "take it twice a day" — and nothing else. (study)
