Open Discussion Brand names of medicines and active substance

[Cyanoide]

Brand names of different medicines vary a lot between different countries. Often users only name the brand name (most often the US brand names, since most users are from the US) but not the active substance in the medicine. So if someone says Clonopin it really doesn't say much to me (OK, a bad example because I can already guess it's clonazepam). Valium would have told me absolutely nothing without googling it.

I think it would be a good idea to instruct users to instead name the substance and not the brand name. Or at least put the substance name in a parentheses; e.g. Valium (diazepam). This way it would be much easier for everyone to know what drug we're talking about without having to google the brand name.

I guess this can be hard to implement but it would save many from searching around to know what the user is writing about.

 

[tambourine-man]

Pretty much impossible to implement, IMO. The number of edits and moderator actions would be overwhelming.

One only needs to Google the trade name. It tends to be pretty good at providing the chemical name (via BNF, USP, Merck, Wikipedia), even if the trade name is misspelt.

 

[felix]

this is already a rule in Other Drugs, and possibly others:

3) USE PROPER GENERIC DRUG NAMES
Bluelight's membership consists of people from all over the globe. Both street drugs and medications have very different names depending on your area of the world, so please always use the generic drug/chemical name. Please refer to all drugs by their correct name to avoid confusion.

is it actually a big problem elsewhere? if you see a thread with an ambiguous title, please feel free to report it or send a PM to the mods.

 

[The Network]

I don't really think it's that big of a problem... scripts are only 5% of the drugs discussed on here, and 80% of the threads use the real name(don't really know what to call it, it's not the chemical name, but not the brand name).

But tambourine is right, you can move your mouse 4 inches over to the google search bar and type "tylenol" and it shows "acetaminophen" and a short description.