Eli5: what is the difference between a generic drug to the original drug, and why do some doctors will swear by the original drug?
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Most medicine doses are actually very tiny. On their own, a single dose of most medicines might look like only a few specks of dust. This creates problems if you actually try to dispense medicine in that format: it becomes too hard for people to measure out the right dose, or tell two different medicines apart. It’s even too small to really swallow effectively.
To get around this problem, medicines are packaged up into larger pills. Each pill has a predetermined amount of the medicine inside it, called the active ingredient. The rest of the pill is made up of inactive ingredients: fillers to make the pill bigger, colors to make it easier to identify, coatings that make it easier to swallow, and so on. None of these inactive ingredients are medicine: only the active ingredient is. But the inactive ingredients help make it possible to take the medicine in a safe, efficient way, and so in that way, they help the medicine do its work.
The active ingredients in generic drugs must be chemically identical to the ones in name-brand drugs. However, other ingredients can be different. Doctors can specify on a prescription that the brand-name version is medically necessary, if, for example, they think the patient might be allergic to some of the inactive ingredients in a generic version of the same medicine.
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