Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
[music] Hello, I’m Dr. Neal Schultz
[pause]
and welcome to DermTV.
I’m often asked, what’s the difference between brand and generic
medications, do they work the same? The short answer is, sometimes they do
and sometimes they don’t. A brand medication is a medicine created,
developed and researched by a brand name pharmaceutical company like Merck
or Pfizer. It spends many, many years in development and research and
finally submits all of its evidence to the FDA to demonstrate that it’s
safe, that it’s effective, that it does this, it does that… it’s a very
stringent process. After about eighteen years, the patent runs out and then
a generic drug manufacturer can copy or attempt to copy the same drug to do
the same thing provided it has the same active ingredient. It has to have
the same active ingredient but all of the other ingredients in the pill can
be different and as a result of that, sometimes they work the same and
sometimes they work differently. However, both pills, both the generic drug
and the brand drug, will have the same active ingredients. But let me give
you an example. For Christmas you decide to send the same beautiful belt to
two friends, and you buy it from two different stores and the shipping
departments in those two different stores pack it differently. One store
packs it with soft, smooth packing and puts it in a water-proof cardboard
box and the other company puts in sharp angular packing that’s not soft and
wraps it in a very thin cardboard box. In the course of being delivered to
your friends, both of these boxes get bounced around, they get rained on
and so on and so forth and as a result, one of the gifts arrives in
pristine condition and the other one arrives with nicks and scratches and
water stains; it doesn’t always happen, but that can happen if they’re
packaged differently. The same thing really applies to generic and brand
medications. Again, the active ingredients are the same, however, the
coloring agents may be different, the emulsifiers may be different, the
fillers may be different, the preservatives may be different, and the
binders which hold it all together may also be different, and there may be
differences in other ingredients also. To add insult to injury, the generic
medication, while it has to have the same active ingredient, doesn’t have
to have the same amount. It can be anywhere between 75 to 100% of the
quantity in the brand medication. Sometimes they work the same and
sometimes they don’t. I for one prefer brand medications for myself.