Editorials

Naming of drugs: pass the epinephrine, please

The prescribing, supply, and consumption of medicines are common occurrences. In 1994 over 300 million prescriptions were issued in Britain. The drugs involved were referred to either by their proprietary or approved names. Proprietary names are often catchy and easy to remember, and their biological activity is consistent, as opposed to certain generics, for which considerable biological non-equivalence has been shown.¹ However, using proprietary names has disadvantages. Firstly, most of them give little idea of the nature of the active ingredients, especially in the case of compound preparations. Secondly, proprietary names encourage illogical prescribing: products whose names begin with the letters in the first half of the alphabet are prescribed significantly more often than those from the latter half. A third problem is the fact that there is little or no international consistency among proprietary names.

By contrast, although the approved . . . [Full text of this article]

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This article has been cited by other articles:

• Aronson, J. K (2000). "Where name and image meet"---the argument for "adrenaline". BMJ 320: 506-509 [Full text]  
• Navarro, F. A (1996). Naming of drugs. BMJ 313: 688-689 [Full text]  
• Bradley, N. (1996). BMJ should use "paracetamol" instead of "acetaminophen" in its index. BMJ 313: 689-689 [Full text]