ABSTRACT
One of the terms of the debate that rages about self-medication is the competence (Hunter, 2010) of the users, or rather what the health professionals believe to be their incompetence, which mirrors the distrust subjects sometimes feel towards their doctor. Here, I do not seek to takes sides in this debate. Within the remit of such a study, an anthropologist’s role is not to support those who loudly proclaim the existence of a ‘lay’ knowledge that rivals a professional or ‘expert’ knowledge,1 rendering users capable of self-medicating, nor is it to support those who contest this knowledge or who at least reject the competence it would provide in treating oneself through self-medication. Because it is indeed this issue of knowledge that is raised alongside that of competence. Studies into the meaning assigned to the practice of self-medication tend to avoid reflecting on the relationship to knowledge it implies. The authors of the CSA/CECOP (2007) study identified three groups of patients: those for whom self-medication means ‘treating oneself without going to see a doctor’, those for whom it is ‘seeing a pharmacist to treat oneself without seeing a doctor’, and those who think it is ‘choosing medicines oneself with which to treat oneself’. Yet, these three categories do not hold the same status as regards the relationship with medical power, and especially not in terms of the knowledge it is based on, since the first phrase emphasises lay knowledge as opposed to professional knowledge, the second emphasises pharmacist knowledge as opposed to that of the doctor, while the third only emphasises the user’s role as a ‘consumer’. The posture of the user towards knowledge remains unexplored even though these categories can overlap as regards this issue.
