Pre-Packaged Medication Quantities Don't Equal Days in a Month

Someone, somewhere in France needs remedial training in the number of days in a month. From the perspective of a couple of non-natives, French prescription medications here are pre-packaged in quantities that don't always make sense. In the U.S. when the pharmacist fills the prescription, the prescribed quantity of pills (capsules, tablets, etc.) is counted out by hand or by machine & then put into the vial & labeled with dosing instructions. In France, with one exception, I've only seen pills that come pre-packed in small boxes with push-through inserts, such as the photo below (for a non-prescription medication). The exception was a medication that was pre-packaged in bottles, but this meant that to get the correct number of pills, I needed to buy two bottles, because one bottle did not have quite enough, & I was left with a nearly full bottle of pills after taking the prescribed dosage for the illness.

The packaging shown here is a waste for only 12 pills and it creates more for the landfills, but that is not really the issue. With prescription medications the quantities often don't make sense. For instance, when a doctor prescribes meds that are to be taken daily, the boxes contain either 28 or 30 pills. When looking at a calendar it quickly becomes obvious that there is only one month with 28 days, & only four with 30 days, which means that you will run short of pills in seven of the 12 months. The doctor writes the prescription for 3 months, so it generally necessitates quarterly trips to the doctor, which is reasonable. But, when the pills run out before the end of 3 months, this means that one has to go back to the doctor more frequently to get new prescriptions. Of course, one does not run out of all the pills at the same time, because each medication (& each brand of a particular medication) comes with a different number of pills.

In the grand scheme of things, it's not a huge issue, rather something a bit perplexing to someone not used to this system.