During the past year, 8 out of 10 French people have self-medicated for a mild health problem, especially to treat headaches or throats.
How do the French manage mild health problems on a daily basis? It is in particular to answer this question that the Pierre Fabre laboratories and the Ipsos have joined forces to carry out a major survey among French people on self-medication as a first resort (1).
Published on Wednesday, this work reveals that over the past year, 8 out of 10 French people have treated their pathologies using authorized drugs, without prior medical advice or prescription. They mainly resort to self-medication to treat mild headaches (77%) or sore throats (69%). Colds, rhinitis or cough problems follow. On average, the purchase of drugs in pharmacies, without going through the “doctor” box, is practiced 3 times a year.
Above all, young people
It is above all young people who use it the most (85% of 25-34 year olds), but also senior executives and women, against 80% for all French people.
Thus, 91% of French people have at least one drug in their medicine cabinet in which they store on average 11 different drugs (drugs which come for half from recent or old purchases delivered on prescription, or which were bought in prevention).
The pharmacist’s advice
Logically, almost all French people (97%) say they are “comfortable” with self-medication. “Avoiding seeing the doctor and the fact that these are drugs that they have been taking for a long time” are the two main reasons given by respondents to explain their recourse to self-medication.
But in 56% of these cases, they still seek the advice of the pharmacist to buy the drug that would suit them best. For disorders such as fatigue, sleep disorders and anxiety, the French however do not take medication and wait for the ailments to pass for nearly 60% of them.
… the role of the general practitioner
In the same vein, more than one in two French people (59%) consider that certain consultations during the year could have been replaced by a visit to the pharmacy, or even a simple telephone exchange with the practitioner.
And in a complicated economic context, the French even begin to think about the state of public expenditure since three-quarters of them declare that the reimbursement of consultations, for benign health problems, represents for Social Security ” a significant cost ”.
Finally, the Internet will perhaps one day be a competitor for health professionals: nearly 20% of respondents already place their trust in it in the event of a medical glitch. However, the purchase of drugs on the Internet remains a very marginal practice, only 11% of French people have already done so.
(1) Survey carried out from May 3 to 5, 2016, which made it possible to interview a representative national sample of more than 3,000 French people via the Internet.
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