Medicine

Know Your Medicines for Colds, Fever, and Pain
by Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
Winter is here and its a season filled with holidays, snow, school vacation (yippee!)... and winter cold and flu season. Many people will have sniffling, sneezing, coughing, or fever during the winter months.

Ensuring Drugs Are Safe and Effective : Accelerated Approval
by Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
Traditional approval requires that clinical benefit be shown before approval can be granted. Accelerated approval is given to some new drugs for serious and life-threatening illnesses that lack satisfactory treatments.

Imported Drugs Safety : Internet Challenges
by Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
When it comes to buying prescription drugs online, Canada is dealing with some of the same regulatory challenges that occur in the United States. In May, the Ontario College of Pharmacists announced that it laid charges against The Canadian Drug Store

How to Protect Yourself Against Drug Tampering : Part 2
by Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
But while FDA laid down the law concerning tamper-resistant features, its regulations stress that these features cannot prevent tampering; they simply help to alert the consumer if tampering has occurred.

Greater Access to Generic Drugs
by Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
Generic drugs are safe, effective, and cost less. The FDA has launched an initiative to encourage the availability of these alternatives to brand-name medications. Generic drugs are copies of brand-name drugs and are available in both over-the-counter

Metabolomics and Personalized Medicine : Benefits
by Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
Liver injury brought on by a drug is the leading cause of acute liver failure in the United States and is the most frequent reason a new drug is removed from the market, says John Senior, M.D., associate director for science

CFC-Free Medication for an Ailing Ozone Layer
by Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
Protect the environment or provide life-saving drugs? FDA proposes to solve that dilemma with the phaseout of chlorofluorocarbon-containing medical products, but not until safe and effective alternatives are available.

Save Money On Prescription Drugs : Communicating With Your Doctor
by Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
It's a good idea to tell your doctors whether paying for medicine is a problem, says Edward Langston, M.D., a family physician in Lafayette, Ind., and an American Medical Association trustee.

Rare Disease Treatments: Orphans' Saving Lives : Part 2
by Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
That was the case with Ucephan, made by Saul Brusilow, M.D., at Johns Hopkins University until it was picked up by Kendall-McGraw. Ucephan is used to treat three forms of urea-cycle disorder that, combined, affect perhaps 30,000 people.

Metabolomics and Personalized Medicine
by Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
Urine and other body fluids provide clues to how a person will react to a drug. Scientists believe there are 30,000 to 40,000 genes in the human body. A gene is a piece of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA).

Customizing Prescription Drugs
by Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
Health professionals are compounding when they prepare a specialized drug product to fill an individual patient's prescription when an approved drug can't fill the bill. Compounding sometimes involves nothing more than crushing a pill into a powder

When Is a Medical Product Too Risky?
by Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
Following the recent withdrawal of several prescription drugs from the market because of adverse effects, consumers may wonder, how safe are approved drugs and other medical products? Safer than ever, says the director of FDA's drug center.

Medicines from Space : Part 2
by Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
Other phenomena occur more slowly in space than on Earth. One example is the growth of protein crystals from biological cells, which are important in the development of treatments for cancer, AIDS and diabetes.

Prescription Drug Information Labels
by Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
In January 2006, the Food and Drug Administration unveiled a major revision to the format of prescription drug information, commonly called the package insert. To manage the risks of medication use and to reduce medical errors, the newly designed package

Toward Safer and More Effective Drugs, Food and Medical Products
by Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
New technologies and tools have been developed as a direct result of the nation's decade-long effort to understand the entire sequence of the molecule that holds the genetic information that makes us who we are.

Generic Drugs
by Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
Almost half of all prescriptions in the United States are filled with generic drugs. They are safe, effective, and FDA-approved. New drugs are developed by innovator firms.

Medicines: Use Them Safely
by National Institute on Aging
Modern medicine has made our lives better in many ways. It has helped older adults live longer, healthier lives. But people over 65 have to be careful when taking medications, especially when they're taking many different drugs.

Development of Medical Products, Drugs
by Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
Drugs recently approved by the Food and Drug Administration help children with rheumatoid arthritis walk, prevent or halt heart disease, slow the progression of multiple sclerosis, and cure infectious diseases. New medical devices improve the heart's bloo

Experimental Treatments: Getting Access, Beyond Clinical Trials
by Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
For patients in search of a cutting edge treatment, the possibilities have improved dramatically. First of all, there are more clinical studies under way than ever before. FDA has on file more than 13,000 active drug and biologic studies.

Experimental Treatments: Not Always Unavailable
by Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
Under an FDA program, patients with life-threatening diseases such as AIDS or cancer can receive promising investigational drugs before they are approved for general use.