| Unless you are eager to spend a good deal of money - often hundreds of dollars a year - by buying branded instead of generic drugs, you should ask for the generic version, in particular if you are starting on a medication for the first time.
Generics accounted for less than 19% of all prescriptions filled in 1984. Today, generic medications represent more than 54% of all prescriptions sold in the United States of America. In addition, even though generic medications account for more than half of prescriptions dispensed, they account for less than 16 cents of every dollar spent on prescription medications. Now there are more than 7,800 generics of approximately 10,668 FDA-sanctioned pharmaceuticals.
A great many people would like to know if there is any difference between the efficacy and safety of brand name drugs and their generics. They would like to know if the quality and efficacy have been compromised to produce lower-cost pharmaceuticals.
A 1990 study by FDA laboratories situated around the USA proved that for those classes of prescription medicines that were likely to cause safety or efficacy problems if they were not manufactured appropriately, the generic drug satisfied the required standards in almost all cases. The categories of drugs tested included contraceptives, antibiotics, and medicines prescribed for asthma, epilepsy, high blood pressure and abnormal heart rhythms. Of the 429 samples of the 24 different drugs examined, including both branded medicines and generics, there were no samples examined that posed a health hazard to patients when studied for effectiveness.
The reason that these 24 various medicines were selected is that they all have a limited therapeutic scope. This means that unlike with most kinds of drugs, for which there is a relatively large scope of dosages that are both efficient and relatively safe, the amount of these medications that gets into the body must be more tightly controlled. If it is not, the drug may too easily lose its effectiveness (if the dose is too low) or become toxic (if the dosage is too high).
The drugs examined included 6 asthma medicines, 4 drugs for treating epilepsy, 4 high blood pressure medicines, 4 drugs for treating heart arrhythmias, a birth control pill, one antibiotic, a drug for treating depression, and the so-called blood-thinning medication. In 6 categories of drugs, both branded and generics were examined. In the case of the contraception, all of the primary brand names, but no generic medication, were tested.
The FDA laboratory tests for purity and quality concluded that there was no difference between the branded and the generics for 23 of the 24 medicines examined. |
