Useful Websites : Drugs (Pharmaceutical)

Life West provides links to external websites as a service to students who want to diversify their studies.  No endorsement is implied.

 

Drug Information Sources 

http://caphis.mlanet.org/consumer/druginfo.html

CAPHIS, the Consumer and Patient Health Information Section of the Medical Library Association, provides selective resources that meet its quality criteria.

Drugs@FDA
http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cder/drugsatfda/index.cfm
A catalog of FDA approved and tentatively approved prescription, over-the-counter, and discontinued drugs. Includes drug approval letters, labels, and review packages.

DrugWatch.com

http://www.drugwatch.com/

This HonCode certified site is sponsored by a law firm.  Although it selectively lists drugs, its strong points are "Understanding side effects", FDA alerts, other news about drugs, and consumer-level information about common conditions which may be linked to drug therapy.

LactMed
http://toxnet.nlm.nih.gov/cgi-bin/sis/htmlgen?LACT
Contains over 450 drug records, with information such as maternal levels in breast milk, infant levels in blood, potential effects in breastfeeding infants and on lactation itself, the American Academy of Pediatrics category indicating the level of compatibility of the drug with breastfeeding, and alternate drugs to consider.

MedlinePlus:  Drugs, Supplements, and Herbal Information
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/druginformation.html
Searching his portal from the National Library of Medicine references information in MedlinePlus, AIDSinfo, Medline/PubMed, LactMed, HSDB, Natural Standard, TOXLINE, DailyMed, ClinicalTrials.gov, PubChem, NIAID Anti-HIV/OI Database, ChemIDplus, Drugs@FDA, DEA, and USA.gov.   Provides links to additional resources. Basic information on prescription and over-the-counter medications is from American Society of Health-System Pharmacists's AHFS® Consumer Medication Information.

PubMed Clinical Q&A by Laura Dean (NCBI Bookshelf, 2008- )

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK62349/

Each summary contains several questions that compare treatments, for example, "How do statins compare in reducing 'bad cholesterol' (LDL-c)?"