Generic medicine – a way to spare costs on prescribed drugs

If your physician has prescribed you some kind of medicine and offered to use a generic variant instead of original one, you must be embarrassed as to which variant is better. But you have to know, that all characteristics of the medicine are absolutely the same. The only question is whether you want to spare some money by purchasing a less expensive product.

Any medicine, whether a generic or a branded variant, is controlled by a special official organization. In the US such organization is called the FDA (Federal Drug Administration). It is not legal to sell any kind of medication without an approval of this organization. FDA has to make sure, that all products on the market are safe for consumers and have the desired effect.

If any company that produces the drugs will try to sell a product, which is not approved by the Drug Administration, it will be immediately sued and the product will never get to the stores. Because of this you can be confident, that all generic drugs you purchase have the approval of the same official agency, as the original branded variants. The only thing you have to do for your safety – is to order the drugs from a reliable source, for example, your physician.

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The whole scheme works like this: when some company produces a drug, it gets a patent, which gives an exclusive right to sell this drug to the manufacturer. After this patent expires, other companies are allowed to produce a generic version of this medicine. This leads to a higher competition between the companies and thus makes the product less expensive. Usually a patent in the US lasts for about twenty years.

Any drug on the market has to pass a number of tests and checkups, before the manufacturer will be actually able to sell it. Official organizations want to make sure that the drug is of the expected quality. This implies a great number of aspects, including size and weight of the drug. But the main characteristic is the chemical compound of the medicine. Production of the generic medicine is much less expensive, than the production of its branded equivalent. It is possible to manufacture and sell the product very quickly, without a necessity to perform a considerable amount of preliminary work, as it has already been performed.

Generic drugs are widely sold in the developing countries. For example, India and the countries of South Africa put a lot of effort into the process of developing and manufacturing of the generic medicine.

This all means that you and your relatives don't need to pay so much for the medication, which can be purchased for about a half of the price or even less. The only thing you have to do is to check whether the purchased drug is fully licensed and approved by the FDA.

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