Serious question. They all have very outrageous, strange names and I’m positive they mean something, but where do those names come from?? Someone has to know!
In: 10
In the west, every drug is given two names: a generic name, and a brand name. The generic name is a name that you use for it regardless who makes it, and that has a part at the beginning that’s made up but usually a play on words for whatever it does — the ending is usually something that comes from a list of endings that tell you what kind of medicine it is (like -mab for “monoclonal antibody”). The brand name is typically shorter, unique, doesn’t sound like another drug, and usually has a play on words to add something related to what it is for. They consider all sorts of things for brand names, like “does it sound like a dirty word in the countries where we’ll sell it” and “is the name close to another drug name; we don’t want them to get confused”. Naming is hard because there’s lots of drugs.
A generic name would be “coffee”, and a brand name would be “Maxwell House”.
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