How to Look up Medications Online

This article will offer steps for finding useful and reliable information online about particular drugs and medications.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

1. Find out both the brand name and the generic name of your medication. If you cannot ask your physician or pharmacist, you can look on your pill bottle or search the Internet with the name you have in the search bar.

2. While you can simply use Google or Yahoo or any other search engine, the most trusted medical resources online include the Mayo Clinic Web site and Web MD, though Web MD has been criticized for offering advice that is too general or vague.

3. For either site, www.mayoclinic.com or www.webmd.com, enter either the generic or brand drug name in the search bar. Use the other to check against the search results and ensure you are reading the correct information.

4. If the search turns up conditions instead of a medication, click the condition and then click to the treatment section, where common drugs used to treat the condition are listed.

Tips & Warnings

• Reading about your medications is important, and learning how they interact with other medications is even more important. It could be helpful to have the names and uses of your other medications handy to reference when you come to sections that say, for example, do not use with NSAIDs. Then you can search your other medications to determine if any fall in that category.

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Resources

• Mayo Clinic
• Web MD