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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Sometimes, not always, it comes down to the type of donuts, quality of coffee and popularity of the free pens that the drug companies bring to the doctor’s office. Perks per se.
Doctors have an endless line of drug company representatives who are usually very cute, buy them lunch, offer them “expert paid speaking roles”, and encourage them to proscribe the name brand drugs and the latest drug that is 1% different than the previous drug which is now generic. Doctors like to have cute people buy them lunch and pay them money, so they often do it and prescribe the name brand drug.
My mom is a doctor and she told me that sometimes she prescribes brands over generic (or more expensive brands over other brands) because of the ways she has seen the patients react to them. This is specially true for medicines that affect your stomach, so she would tell people that the brand was more expensive, but the stomach side effects would be milder, so it was up to them to choose.
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Hi, I work in European intellectual property. There’s some great points being discussed but also there’s a key IP point no one seems to have mentioned yet – patent thickets.
Basically, when a drug company finds a new drug, they patent it – gaining the rights to stop others from using that drug for a fixed period of time. When that runs out, other companies can sell generics with the “same” active ingredient.
HOWEVER, the drug company didn’t sit on their pile of money, forming wads of notes into a comfy sofa, they found other little inventions around the drug:
– the best way to put the pill together for the best release profile,
– the best way to crystallise the drug to have the best response profile,
– the best dosage regimen to treat the disease,
– the best way to make the drug itself
All of these inventions can be patented, forming a thicket of rights around the drug. And because these are discovered later than the drug itself, the monopoly from those patents runs out later (this is called “evergreening”).
So, the generic companies may be able to sell pills with the “same” active ingredient, but they may not (yet) be able to sell pills with the optimum results, so they may have to tweak other things to provide the same dose-response to be allowed to sell them, which can cause toxicity issues etc.
related but i just started ssris and my doc said theyre all chemically identical or whatever but people still react to them slightly differently and theyre unsure why
I believe there is one factor that these other answers are missing that makes generic drugs chemically different (sometimes) from the original drug.
When building large molecules, often you get both one version of the molecule (call it Version1) along with its mirror (Version2). For many drugs, which of these versions you get doesn’t make a difference. However, sometimes only Version1 of the molecule is an effective medicine. Also, sometimes Version1 and Version2 have side effects with different levels of severity.
Different ways of building the molecule give different amounts of Version1 relative to Version2, and the original manufacturer keeps their manufacturing process secret. So, if the generic is using a different chemical reaction to build the drug, and it ends up creating more of the inactive version of the drug, it will be less effective despite being technically the same medicine.
This is a bigger problem for some drugs than others and some people than others. Doctors know this and so might stick with the name brand for some drugs and be fine with generics for others. Notice this gets more complicated when you realize that a drug might have several generic manufacturers each using a different process so all their drugs contain different amounts of Version1 and Version2. So it’s not necessarily the case that the generic version of a drug sold by one pharmacy is the same as the generic version of the same drug sold by a different pharmacy.
There is no real difference, it’s a scheme Made up bye the pharma industry to protect their profits.
Generics need to comply with strict regulations, including fillers, coatings, realease profile…
Most of the Big pharma companies also outsource manufacturing to the very dame companies that make the generics.
A lot of people have answered about the differences between generic and brand meds.
I (emergency medicine resident) will try to answer your question about why doctors prescribe one over the other. For the most part, it makes no difference to me. If it saves the patient some money ill try to do that. There are a few medicines that experience has taught me that patients really can tell the difference between brand and generic. Synthroid is one of these that I’ll do brand if possible
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