Half of the prescription medications that doctors give are like double-barrelled and 10-syllables. Is there a specific reason for this? Is it a chemistry thing, or a safety thing so miscommunication is less likely?
In: Chemistry
Basically, every single syllable in the name is such that it tells you something about the drug.
To use the example that I found first while researching this because it’s really simple:
Sildenafil
-afil tells you that it is a PDE 5 (there aren’t any ELI5 explanations for that) inhibitor, which helps controls blood flow and is useful as treatment for high blood pressure and pulmonary hypertension, and as a quirky little side effect as was discovered during clinical trials helps people with erectile disfunction. Other drugs that work using the same mechanism in the body are tadalafil, vardenafil, and avanafil
As far as I have been able to find, if you manage to do something entirely novel with medicine you get to make the suffix that describes it.
A fairly comprehensive breakdown of what syllables mean what can be found [here](https://cdn.who.int/media/docs/default-source/international-nonproprietary-names-(inn)/stembook-2018.pdf?sfvrsn=32a51b3c_6&download=true)
This is regulated by the WHO so the same generic name means the same thing everywhere
Silden- is the prefix that indicates who made the drug and serves to distinguish it from other similar drugs.
The rules around that are that it has to be 2 syllables, it can’t have a Y, K, H, J, or W, you can’t use the generic name as marketing, and you can’t use medical terminology in the prefix in case it turns out to have useful side effects unrelated to the intended purpose of the drug (see the Viagra/Sildenafil example above)
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