"Just take a paracetamol and look at it." Almost everyone knows that phrase. It's usually great advice. But in the Netherlands, more than 1.1 million kilos of paracetamol are sold and distributed per year, equivalent to approximately 6 million tablets per day. Almost three quarters of this is sold without a prescription, out of sight of the GP.
In the new file we list what those figures mean: what the evidence says about the effect on common symptoms, what the pressure on GP care looks like, and which figure is not recorded anywhere: how many people never call back after "just look at it".
The core of the file: paracetamol is not the care trap. A first step without control, without an end date, without a second step. That's the care trap.
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