Drugs and Web Searches
You might find yourself doing drug searches a lot more often than you do regular medical searches. You might want to know what your headache remedy's possible side effects are, or you might be considering changing your blood pressure medication, and you want to get more information about different medications available. Or you might simply see a drug commercial on television and be curious. In that case you'll have a lot of search options.
General Web Searches
When you do a regular Web search for a drug name, what you'll get will vary a lot. If you're searching for a common though not widely known drug, like Synthroid, you'll get mostly useful results from several different kinds of sites. (If you find an overwhelming number of sites to be commercial in nature, add site:edu to your search.) If you search for a drug that's more well known, like Prozac, you will get everything from anti-Prozac sites to commercial sites to informational sites. If you find your search getting gunked up with a lot of irrelevant material, I've got a few suggestions for you:
Add symptoms of the disorder that's supposed to be treated. If you were searching for Prozac you could add the words “depression” or “depressed,” or the phrase “social anxiety.” The more medically oriented the term you add, the better your search is going to be; if you're searching for Prilosec, adding the query “acid reflux disease” will get you better results than “heartburn.”
TIP
At this point you may be wondering about all those advertisements for drugs that you can get “without prescription” from any number of places, often overseas. You may be wondering if this is something you want to try. I can't tell you what to do, but I can tell you I'd be very wary of a drug I ordered from overseas with no assurance that it came from a doctor or pharmacy or anybody remotely connected to a medical profession. There is a problem with counterfeit drugs all over the world; are you sure you're ingesting what you think you're ingesting?
If you know the full, “official” name of the drug, use that. Zoloft is the “brand name” for sertraline. Searching for sertraline will get you far different results than Zoloft.
There are also some words you can add to your search to change the results some:
“Controversy”— Finds articles about drug controversies, and is more slanted to finding news stories and roundup pages than more general drug pages.
“FDA”— This term removes results rather than narrows the results to a new category. It removes a lot of “online shopping” links, especially for very popular drugs. If you're still having trouble with too many shopping links, try removing these phrases from your search: “shopping cart” or “no doctor.” (“No doctor” is short for “no doctor prescription required,” a phrase used on many overseas drug sites.)
“Risk study”— These words will provide both stories about controversial aspects of a particular drug and stories about diseases related to that drug. For example, the Google search Xanax risk study provides information about Xanax effects and more general pages and news on mental illness. If you want even more medically oriented pages, try adding the words “percent,” “dosage,” or “placebo” to your search.
“Tried x”— If you're looking for discussion from consumers of drugs, this is the phrase to try, where “x” is the name of the drug in which you're interested. This will lead you to mailing list archives and online discussions from different disease support sites. Try misspelling the name of the drug when you use this phrase and see what turns up.
Some Good Web Sites
There are many places that contain overview information about drugs.
RxList—http://www.rxlist.com/
RxList is kind of funny. On the one hand, I'm thrilled to be able to search for a keyword, side effects, interactions, and so on. On the other hand, the idea of almost weekly “comix” on a pharmaceutical site is strange. But there's enough information here to overlook that.
You might not even have to do a search; the top 150 searched drugs are already on the front page. If you do search, you'll see that you can search by several different things, including keyword, generic or brand name, imprint code, and so on. (There's also a simple name search on the front page.) You'll be surprised; you'll get a lot of results for a single drug search, but that's because there will be different results based on dosage. One link on the results page will give you a page of basic information about the drug, including how it's taken, possible side effects, warnings and precautions, what to do if you missed a dose, what to do if you've overdosed, etc. Another link takes you to a search results list for possible side effects and interaction problems. As you might imagine, there's a lot of information here.
Drugs.com—http://www.drugs.com/
Drugs.com allows you to either browse drugs by first name or search by keyword. They also have news about recent additions to the database and news about recent drug FDA approvals. Drug information includes extensive information about the drug, what it's supposed to do, and how to take it. In addition to the drug information, this site also offers news and articles, an interactions checker, an image search, and several bulletin boards.
Yahoo Health—http://health.yahoo.com/health/pdr_drugs/a.html
Yahoo Health's information is not as detailed as the other sources I've mentioned here, but the results are very quick and easy to read. There is a huge amount of information here on proper dosage and storage, as well as pointers to information from other parts of Yahoo.
Both doctors and pharmacists are very busy; if all you get with your prescription is a brief information sheet, you'll learn a lot more by checking out one of these resources online. But remember, there's no way that the Internet can substitute for the advice of a flesh-and-blood doctor. If you're confused about information you find online, or need more details, consult your health care provider.