I’ve just concluded my visit to the Musée des Beaux Arts de Dijon by climbing the stairs to the top of Tour Phillipe Le Bon. What a view! But now it’s time to go back down and get back to the apartment to check on the status of my under-the-weather Better Half. When I got there, she was sitting in the living room instead of lying in bed, which was a good sign, but she was still pretty sick. We decided that I should go to the nearest “pharmacie” and try to get something that would make her feel better.
They have medicine in France that we don’t have back home, and on one occasion a long time ago, a French pharmacist gave us something that worked like a miracle drug. That would certainly be nice right now.
Pharmacies in France
Pharmacies in France are different than the ones back home. They’re all small, independent operations, and they only sell medicine and things closely related to medicine. There’s nothing like Rite Aid here. Pharmacies are easy to spot because they have a green cross of one sort or another clearly displayed.
Pharmacists in France function partly as pharmacists, and partly as doctors. Over here, if you get sick, chances are you’ll go see your local pharmacist first, instead of a doctor. You tell the pharmacist what’s ailing you. The pharmacist will ask you some questions, just like a doctor would, and will come to some sort of conclusion.
The conclusion might be that you have something too serious or too uncertain for the pharmacist to deal with. In that case they’ll either refer you to a doctor or send you to a hospital. If you’re really sick, they might call for an ambulance to come and get you.
If the pharmacist thinks he or she might know what’s got you down, they’ll suggest some medicine. Maybe a box of this, a tube of that, or a bottle of whatever. The directions will be on the package, but they’ll tell you how to take the medicine and whatever else might be useful for you to know.
French Pharmacists Don’t Count
Here’s something interesting… pharmacists in France don’t ever count out pills. What we do at home is go to the doctor, who writes a prescription for X number of pills, then we go to the pharmacy department of a store where a pharmacist will read the prescription, count out X number of pills, and sell them to you.
Pharmacists in France don’t do any counting. Regardless of who makes the recommendation, what you get is a pre-packaged box, bottle, or tube of medicine, just as if you took it off the shelf yourself. Maybe you’d get the large size or the small size, but that’s the extent of it. Pretty simple, eh? When I think of the way we do it compared to the way they do it, our way sounds just plain crazy, no?
Anyway, off I went to the pharmacy, which was just down the street. The pharmacist didn’t speak English, so we had a bit of a time communicating, but I felt like we were able to understanding each other pretty well. I won’t drag you through the whole conversation. Besides, for some of it you had to be there to see the body language to get the full effect. (You can use your imagination).
Homeopathy to the Rescue?
When he figured out what he thought would help, the pharmacist suggested two different kinds of pills. One was a homeopathic medicine, which are more popular in France than they are at home. He asked me if I was familiar with homeopathic medicine. I must admit that at this point I stretched the truth a wee bit and said that I was. I kind of thought that maybe I sort of was, at least a little, or at least that I’d heard the term. Yes – I was pretty sure that I had heard the term.
He must have sensed my more-than-shallow understanding of the term, because he asked me two or three times. He wanted to be sure that he wasn’t selling me something that I didn’t really want. That was really nice, if you think about it. But I figured the more drugs the better, since who knew which one would be the one that did the trick?
I returned with my haul of drugs – two different boxes of pills, and instructions for taking them. The homeopathic ones were tiny. My ailing Better Half took one of each. (I had made sure to verify that it was OK to take both medicines at the same time). Now we’ll see what happens.
Meanwhile, I busied myself by doing some research on the internet to learn about homeopathic medicine. See… what I had meant to tell the pharmacist was that SOON I would know about it, even if I wasn’t too sure about knowing anything about it to begin with. Yeah, that’s it – SOON I would know about it.
It turns out that homeopothopy is the practice of curing someone by giving them a tiny bit of whatever it is that’s making them ill. It almost made sense back when it was first thought of, because the alternatives back then were things like blood-letting, or worse. If you were sick in, say, the 18th century, and the doc gave you the choice between a good blood-letting or some homeopathy, you’d say something like, “I’m totally DOWN with that homeopothopy stuff! Lemme have it!”
Generally, these days, homeopathic drugs are made by starting with some specific thing – maybe an herb or something. But the idea is to give the person just a tiny, tiny amount of the substance. So it gets diluted over and over and over until there’s literally nothing left of the herb – not even one atom – in the eventual medicine. But somehow when you take it – even though it’s nothing – it’s supposed to make you better.
Well, this seemed pretty unbelievable to me, but I read about it in a number of different sources, and they all more or less said the same thing. No wonder the pharmacist wanted to make sure I understood what I was paying for. But guess what else… it turns out that the homeopathic medicine he sold me is one of the most popular drugs that people in France take for the flu. That’s wild, eh?
On the box it says that it’s non-drowsy, there are no side effects, and no drug interactions. You wanna know why? Because there’s nothing in it. Amazing! But who knows? Besides, we don’t care about logic, as long as long as it works. And we’d like for that to be soon, too, because tomorrow we’re supposed to leave Dijon and go to Lyon!
To be continued…
Featured Image: Place de la Libération as seen from the top of Le Tour Phillipe Le Bon
