| Summary: | In Madagascar, traditional medicine practices occur alongside biomedicine practices and are still widely used not only for economic and geographic, but also for political, social, cultural and religious reasons. Individuals consume medicinal plants as well as allopathic medicines, by themselves, on a doctor or medical staff’s prescription or on healers’ advice. The ethnographic elements examined in this article were collected during surveys conducted in Madagascar, in a village of the Analanjirofo region (east coast). This article develops the varieties of health care available for villagers and the therapeutic pluralism at hand in their search for treatment and care. The care choice is built on the kind of treatment desired but also on the supposed etiological model of symptoms or illness (“natural” or “supernatural”). The experience of the patient, the advice given by the “therapy management group” as well as the representations of the remedies’ effectiveness are elements that impact choice for treatment and consumption (in self-medication or at a therapist’s). The search for care, remedies and therapists is here analyzed as a form of “delayed self-medication”.
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