“I don’t understand, we’re not in an underdeveloped country! What is happening ? » Salima Sedira’s incomprehension is at the height of the concern that is growing among many patients: will they have access to the medicine that treats or relieves them, this month, next month, the following? This 55-year-old woman, under treatment since 2006 for her bipolar disorder, experienced a first this summer: impossible to find Valium (diazepam), used to reduce the anxiety from which she suffers. ” Out of stock “he was told in his pharmacy, in Saint-Paul-de-Vence (Alpes-Maritimes).
The credits she was given instead in July didn’t work, she says: “It was catastrophic, it didn’t bother me, I had too much anxiety. » As a result, she scraped her drawer bottoms and found old seals, dating back a year, two years… Added to the “two miracle boxes” that the pharmacist finally received in August, she has enough ” hold “ until mid-September. Then it’s the unknown.
Anxiety, migraine, heart problems, dizziness, osteoporosis… the ailments for which treatments have been lacking in recent weeks are of all kinds, with tensions and stock shortages on medications increasing since the end of the health crisis. If the patients, who responded to a call for testimonials on Lemonde.frspeak first of their ” anguish “they also tell the “galleys” on a daily basis and their “strategies”in a system that often leaves them destitute and forces them to navigate on sight, with some finding themselves forced to adapt, or even interrupt, their treatment.
Forced to “ration”
Thibault Lévèque recognizes it, he lives ” very bad “ the situation: his wife is now obliged to “ration” on his medication, which is essential to all social life, including “to go shopping”. After a major gastroenterological surgery, she can no longer go out without the risk of finding herself in situations “shameful or even degrading”he sums up modestly, about what he calls a “quasi-incontinence of the intestines”. But impossible, since this summer, to find his remedy ” miracle “ – Questran 4gr (cholestyramine) – in the quantity necessary to continue taking it every day.
After finding himself confronted with the empty drawers of pharmacies in his department, Eure, he ended up finding the last box that they have left today 200 kilometers away, in the Ile-de-France region. “We called on the family in Ile-de-France, they called everywhere, they went to at least fifteen pharmacieshe says. Since then, we have put ourselves back in battle order, but we keep failing, it’s a hassle. »
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