Where the data comes from

DailyMed and openFDA, both published by the United States National Library of Medicine and the Food and Drug Administration, carry the full approved prescribing information for medicines sold in the US. These documents are United States government works and are free to use. They are the backbone of the catalogue.

The European Medicines Agency publishes product information for centrally authorised medicines in every official EU language. Where such a document exists for a medicine on this site, it is linked on that medicine's page, in the language of the page.

We take the condensed summary the regulator itself writes at the top of a label, not the full text of every section. Republishing ten kilobytes of a document that already exists on DailyMed would add nothing and would make this site a duplicate of its own source.

We do not translate regulatory text ourselves. A mistranslated contraindication is more dangerous than a line in a foreign language, so approved sections stay in the language of the document that carries the approval, and the European translation is linked where the authority publishes one.

Each medicine page shows the effective date of the label version it was built from. When a label is more than three years old, our import script flags it for review, because outdated medical data is a reason to distrust a source in its own right.