Generic Drug Medicine Names Give Doctors Information

When we want to refer to a certain product, such as an Apple computer or a Tesla car, we use brand names. We may ask for a Kleenex instead of a tissue because brand names are so extensively utilised. There are two names for drugs. The brand name is determined by the company producing it, and that firm is the only one permitted to use it. To help Doctors recall brand names, they are virtually usually brief and snappy.

The World Health Organization, in collaboration with state naming authorities, assigns generic names on a global scale. The length of these names is due in part to the fact that they inform clinicians about the medication’s pharmacologic property and/or chemical structure. Onasemnogene abeparvovec is the generic name for the new $2 million-per-patient medication for spinal muscular atrophy.

Zolgensma is the brand name. Which one will Doctors (and their patients) remember and use? The solution is self-evident. “Some brand names are created to be reassuring or promising — so-called ‘benefit-led’ names such as Paxil, Celebrex, and Gluconorm — when they actually need to be prescribed with great care and consideration of the drug’s potential effects on the individual patient,” writes one of the associate editors at the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

Is it OK to refer to prescription medications by their brand names? Health Canada, it appears, agrees. Do you want to learn more about a medicine’s safety issues? The brand name appears in CAPITALS on Canada’s recall website, while the generic name appears in lower case and in brackets. Do you want to know if the drug for which your Doctors just handed you a prescription is in low supply?