The FDA wants you to know the importance of reading Medication Guides, paper handouts that come with many prescription medicines. The Agency also wants input on how to make these guides as useful and user-friendly as possible.
“The information in a Medication Guide is very important when it comes to getting the most benefit for your health from a medicine,” says Paul Seligman, M.D., M.P.H., Associate Director for Safety Policy and Communication in FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research.
“These guides address issues that are specific to particular drugs and drug classes, and they contain FDA-approved information that can help patients
avoid serious adverse events.”
About 240 products that contain a medicine individually or in combination have Medication Guides available for them. To see a list of these, as well as online links to each Guide, visit www.fda.gov/cder/Office /ODS/medication_guides.htm
Medication Guides offer answers to such crucial questions as:
• What is this drug and what does it do?
• What’s the most important information that I need to know about the medication?
• What are the risks involved in taking this?
• What are the possible side effects?
• Who shouldn’t take the drug?
• What ingredients are in this medication?
Regulations require manufacturers to produce these Guides and pharmacists to distribute them to consumers.
Source: www.fda.gov, May 2009.
