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Terms and conditions for use of the Doctissim.com website


By using the Doctissimo.com website, you signify your assent to the following terms and conditions of use:

1. The Doctissimo website is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.


The materials and services provided on the Doctissimo.com website are not intended, directly or indirectly, to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. The materials aim to improve, not replace, the direct relationship between patients and qualified practitioners. The material and services provided are by no means a substitute for medical examination or diagnosis by your doctor and should not be construed as drug advertisements.

The materials present on the Doctissimo.com website cannot and should not be used as a basis for diagnosis, choice of treatment, use and/or termination of use of a drug without prior consultation of a general practitioner or specialist.

You acknowledge that the materials at your disposal are neither complete nor comprehensive, and that they do not cover the entire range of symptoms, drugs and appropriate treatments available for any medical condition or ailment you may have.

Inoltre, Doctissimo non garantisce in alcun caso il conseguimento di un qualsiasi risultato derivante dall’applicazione pratica delle informazioni e dei servizi proposti.

More specifically, the results obtained from the various quizzes are for informational use only and do not certify the quality or weakness of your current and/or future state of health.

Therefore, you agree that Doctissimo shall not be held liable for the information and services offered on its website, and you assume full personal responsibility for the use of the said information and services.

2. Privacy policy


Personally identifiable information collected by Doctissimo when you sign up for the newsletter or register as a member of the Doctissimo Club is confidential.

Doctissimo further guarantees the confidentiality of personally identifiable information such as names, e-mail addresses and passwords, when receiving subscription forms for services such as discussion forums, blogs, photo albums, webmail, medical applications, ads, the Doctissimo-users directory and online surveys. Only when subscribing to “Offers from our partners”, by selecting “I agree to receive offers from Doctissimo partners”, can your address be transmitted to third parties.

In accordance with the French Data Protection Act (Loi informatique et libertés) of January 6 1978, all users have the right to access, edit, rectify or delete their personal data.

Please remember that any information you reveal, including personally identifiable information while in discussion forums, blogs, chats or private messages, is not subject to this privacy policy and can be seen by third parties unrelated to Doctissimo.

Doctissimo shall not be held liable for “spam” messages received by forum-users who unwittingly and spontaneously disclose their email addresses on public discussion forums.

In compliance with the dispositions of the French Digital Economy Confidence Act (Loi pour la confiance dans l’économie numérique) adopted on June 21 2004, personally identifiable information, and more particularly, IP addresses of users who have placed content on the website, are held and stored by Doctissimo.

Non-personal statistical information, such as visits to pages and average individual page-view numbers, are analysed by Doctissimo and shared with advertisers and institutional partners, as they reflect the habits of users and serve to improve editorial and community content.

Automatic user identification, which allows you to access Doctissimo discussion forums directly without having to re-enter your login and password every time you return to the page, requires cookies. Cookies embedded in the newsletter’s links do not contain personal information and only provide statistical information about the number of clicks per user.

External cookies serve to track advertising activity and to avoid excessive repetitiveness on the website.

There is no personal tracking on the Doctissimo website (IP, cookies).

3. The use of and navigation through the website is subject to current laws and regulations.


Please note that all current laws and regulations are applicable to websites.

Therefore, when you use the services provided on the Doctissimo website, it is your responsibility to abide by all of the following regulations, and more particularly:

Regulations pertaining to copyright; industrial property such as, among others, multimedia products, software, texts, articles, photographs, trademarks, databases as well as images of any kind.

Persons appearing on photographs posted on the Doctissimo website are models and their images are used for illustrational purposes only.

Photographs posted on this website have been regularly acquired from the following photo agency:

© Thinkstock

Doctissimo and its partners have full ownership of intellectual and industrial property rights pertaining to the contents of the Doctissimo website. In this regard, you should note that copyright and proprietary rights notices cannot be taken out and that any unauthorized reproduction of the whole or any part of this material violates copyright laws.

Moreover, you may not extract quantitatively and/or qualitatively substantial amounts of data from the databases available on the Doctissimo website, or make fraudulent use of these databases.

  • - Public order rules, such as regulations pertaining to pornographic, racist or illegal content which could hurt other users’ sensibility and integrity, or damage Doctissimo’s brand image with provoking messages, texts or images.
  • - Rules pertaining to the private lives of persons, users of the Doctissimo website or any third parties. In this regard, you agree to refrain from posting any abusive, insulting, derogatory or denigrating messages, or any messages unrelated to the issues at stake.
  • - Rules pertaining to the right of the press. You may not libel or abuse any person, connected user or third party.
  • - Current rules and regulations pertaining to computer fraud. In this respect, you must refrain from attempting to hack into any automatic data processing system or to alter, partly or entirely, the elements contained therein. Please note that such action is punishable by criminal penalties.


With respect to its interactive services, Doctissimo reserves the right to remove, immediately and without notice, any material, messages, images or graphic content which violates current rules and regulations, and more particularly the afore-mentioned rules.

4. Hyperlinks on the Doctissimo website


Hyperlinks referring to the Doctissimo website require prior authorization from Doctissimo. Therefore, you must if need be contact our Webmaster.

Doctissimo shall not be held liable for materials, information, products and services provided on websites which can be accessed from links in the Doctissimo website.

You further acknowledge that Doctissimo shall not be held liable, directly or indirectly, for any damage such as loss of customers, lawsuit, business difficulties of any kind, loss of brand image, loss of earnings on the grounds of the quality and/or information regarding products and services sold by affiliate partners, or of payment operations performed on their websites.

5. Passwords


It is your sole responsibility to protect attributed passwords for accessing and using limited-access services provided on the Doctissimo website.

You are responsible for taking all security and precautionary steps to protect your password and login.

In the event of a loss or theft of your password and/or login, or if you believe that an unauthorized person is using your password and login, you should notify Doctissimo immediately.

You will then be able to:

  • - Either request that your password and login be replaced if you suspect that they might be used by an unauthorized person;
  • - Or request that your password and login be securely restored to you.


Only Doctissimo’s Webmaster is authorized to securely restore your password and login on your request.

You also agree that your subscription to the Doctissimo club, along with your password and login, will be automatically cancelled after an ongoing period of three years without of use the afore-mentioned service.

Doctissimo shall not be held liable for any fraudulent use of your password and login by a third party.

6. Interactive services on the Doctissimo website


All of the above-mentioned provisions are applicable to participation in interactive services provided on the Doctissimo website.

Therefore, you must comply with all current rules and regulations, more particularly those previously mentioned.

You are responsible for any information, messages, and images and, more generally, any material you circulate through Doctissimo’s interactive services such as the chat and discussion forums.

You acknowledge and agree that Doctissimo can take the initiative, without prior notice, to delete, partly or entirely, any material added by you and/or addressed to you through our interactive services if the said material is liable to infringe current laws and regulations or is in any way contrary to accepted morality and behaviour.

You further acknowledge that Doctissimo does in no event control or guarantee the exactness, lawfulness, quality and reliability of materials of any kind whatsoever placed on the website through the interactive services, and that you shall be held responsible for any possible use of the material placed by you.

Doctissimo shall not be liable for contacts made via its interactive services.

You acknowledge that Doctissimo assumes the sole responsibility of a technical provider, as defined in article 6 of the French Digital Economy Confidence Act (Loi pour la Confiance dans l’Economie Numérique) regarding contents produced by users of Doctissimo’s interactive services and that, therefore:

  • - Doctissimo shall not be held liable for the quality and lawfulness of materials of any kind (texts, sounds, videos, graphic content, photographs and so on) freely added by users;
  • - Doctissimo may, as part of its legal obligations, remove the above-mentioned materials after having been notified by a third party of any illegal contents therein contained;
  • - Doctissimo may, as part of its legal obligations and at the behest of law-enforcement authorities, forward any personally identifiable user information of those who have contributed to the afore-mentioned material.

7. Security


You acknowledge that, notwithstanding Doctissimo’s best efforts, possible technical issues arising on the Internet make it impossible for Doctissimo to ensure or guarantee continual access to the service, consistency of response time as well as 100-per-cent secure data transmission.

In any case, you acknowledge and agree that access to the information and services provided on the Doctissimo website:

  • - May be interrupted in cases of absolute necessity, in cases where Doctissimo is not at fault or for which Doctissimo is not responsible;
  • - May contain technical or human errors;
  • - May result in occasional data losses.

8. Guarantee


While it strives to offer high-quality contents, Doctissimo makes no guarantee as to the completeness, comprehensiveness and exactness of the information and services provided on the website.

In no event shall Doctissimo, its partners and employees be liable for the use you make of the information and services provided on the website.

You hereby agree to abide by all current laws and regulations, and more specifically those previously mentioned.

9. General


Doctissimo reserves the right to vary these terms and conditions of website use. By continuing to use the website you will be deemed to accept such variations.

These terms and conditions constitute all the obligations between the parties and therefore, no general or specific condition defined in other documents shall be considered part of the rights and obligations between Doctissimo and users.

In the event that any term of these terms and conditions is held to be invalid or unenforceable, the remainder thereof shall remain intact.

In the event of difficulty in interpreting any of the clause titles heading up the clauses and any of the clauses, the titles shall be declared not to exist.

These general terms and conditions are governed by French law. This applies to both rules on the merits as well as rules on the form.

Last updated 07.05.2010