Nearly one in four French people are on tranquillisers, antidepressants, antipsychotics or other mood-altering prescription drugs, according to an alarming report published yesterday.
It revealed that an average of 40% of men and women aged over 70 in France were routinely prescribed at least one of this class of dependence-creating drug, as well as some 4% of all children under nine.
”The French now consume between two and four times as many tranquillisers and anti-depressants as the British, Italians and Germans,” one medical expert, Martine Perez, said in Figarohe problem is not new, but this underlines the fact that it is getting worse.”
The French are avid consumers of pills and potions of all kinds, to the extent that the health minister, Jean-François Mattei, faced with a budget overrun of â,¬6,1-billion, this summer listed some 900 so-called medicines (out of a total of 4 300 prescribed in France) that would no longer be reimbursed by the health service because they had ”little or no recognisable medical effect”.
They included such popular Gallic remedies as ”bronchial lubricants” for the lungs, ”hepatitic protectors” for the liver, ”veinotonics” for the circulation and ”choleretics” for the bile.
Panoplies of medicines exist here for ailments that do not appear to exist anywhere else, such as la crise de foie (liver crisis).
French infants suffer from something called la bronchiolite, which in Britain would be diagnosed as a mild chest infection and left well alone.
In France, sufferers are most often prescribed a course of antibiotics or a visit to one of the many specialists who have emerged specially to treat the affliction.
The cost of an expensive course of ”thalassotherapy” — a range of treatments involving seawater, algae and marine mud that is claimed by some French doctors to cure arthritis, asthma, acne and even infertility — could until very recently be reclaimed from the French health service.
A dangerous dependence on mood-altering drugs is an altogether more serious problem. The question troubling some health professionals is whether it is the unique French attitude towards illness, most memorably portrayed in Molière’s 17th-century comedy Le Malade Imaginaire, that has driven them to drugs, or the excellence of the country’s health system.
The French are understandably proud of their health service. Some 66% say they are satisfied with it, compared with 40% in Britain and 20% in Italy. It allows them to choose what doctor or specialist they want to go to (with no need for a referral), and to have up to 70% of the cost reimbursed by the state.
The remainder is generally covered by cheap top-up insurance.
The World Health Organisation rates France’s health system the best there is.
But the French are plainly not sicker than anyone else: according to yesterday’s survey, while 9% of them were prescribed antidepressants in 2000, only 4,7% could be clinically diagnosed as suffering from depression.
”Has the French approach to illness and the body brought about a health system that panders to le malade imaginaire, or has the efficiency and popularity of the system itself bred a whole nation of hypochondriacs?” asked one Paris doctor, Fabrice Henard. ”Either way, it’s something we should worry about urgently.”
Edouard Zarifian, a professor of medical psychology, said both patient and doctor are to blame: patients because they will not be happy unless they walk out of a consultation with a sheaf of prescriptions, and doctors because they are happy to write them. But change can only come by altering doctors’ perceptions, he argues.
”French doctors have become merchants of false happiness”, Prof Zarifian said recently. ”They are unable to resist the pressures of either the patients or the big drugs companies. They are the ones who really need educating.” – Guardian Unlimited Â