Principles of Science-Led Self-Care
Taking more control over your own personal health sounds easy, but the reality can be much more complex.
Standing in front of a store aisle with dozens of products. Trying to sift through endless information on the internet. Making sense of anecdotal stories from friends, family and people on social media. How is the average consumer supposed to know what to make of it all?
We believe strongly in the power of self-care to help people live healthier, happier lives. But confusing self-care — or worse, ineffective self-care — can be worse than no self-care at all.
At Bayer, science is at the core of all we do. We call our approach to delivering safe, effective products science-led self-care.
What this means is that every product is deeply rooted in science — from the early stages of medical research to safety assessments and finally to how to help people more effectively use them.
To do this, we operate under a set of guiding principles for what a science-led self-care product should be and how our team should go about the process of innovating. Through these principles, we hope to give people trust in the choices they are making and products they are using to take better care of their own health.
The five principles of science-led self-care
Science of the human
We are all different — that much is obvious — so self-care must not take a one-size fits all approach. And we all have different unmet medical needs. Science-led self-care starts with focusing on people as individuals including their biology, their microbiome, and even their environments and developing products built for them.
Science of regulation
Science-led self-care products are subject to regulation in the countries they are sold. This is important to ensure products meet standards of safety and efficacy. It can be hard to know who or what to trust, but these regulatory approvals can give users assurance that someone has done the work for them.
Science of discovery
Scientific knowledge is always expanding and that drive for new knowledge and understanding has launched amazing innovation. For science-led self-care that means never stopping asking questions about the way things work and why they are how they are. Discovering new insights — including from unconventional places — helps us to keep advancing science-led self-care.
Science of collaboration
Nobody has all the answers. The best ideas and the best innovations happen when smart people with different strengths join forces for a common good. Science-led self-care that prioritizes partnership and collaboration over individual achievement leads to better products.
Science of consumer-product experience
What good is a product that people can’t or don’t like using? A bad experience can actually reduce people’s use of self-care and that isn’t good for anyone. Understanding how people can access self-care products and how they use them can lead to better experiences, ultimately enabling them to take more control over their own health.
