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How to Use This Site

Usual Duration of Use

Many factors determine how long a medicine must be taken and this is often an area of great controversy: factors such as the nature and severity of symptoms, drug form and strength, ability of the patient to respond, and use of other drugs, among others. The focus here is to help you give the medicine an appropriate amount of time to work. Where appropriate, limitations in how long a medicine should be taken are given.

This Drug Should Not Be Taken If

These are the absolute contraindications to the use of the drug (see contraindication in the Glossary). By consensus, these are circumstances where the medicine should NEVER be taken. Tell your doctor immediately if any information in this category applies to you.

Inform Your Physician Before Taking This Drug If

This category tells you the relative contraindications to a medicine. One way to think of this information is as a relative benefit-to-risk decision. Here again, it is important that you tell your physician or other prescriber if these factors apply to you.

Possible Side Effects

Here you can learn about natural, expected, and usually unavoidable medicine actions-the normal and anticipated consequences of taking it. This gives a realistic perspective balancing side effects with goals of treatment.

Possible Adverse Effects

These are unusual, unexpected, and infrequent drug effects, which are often called adverse drug reactions or effects. These range from mild to serious. In the past, I've attempted to give set percentages to help you. These were often derived from Phase Three studies or current research. In order to more accurately define how frequently these effects happen, I've developed this system:

• Possible: An effect that has been documented for other drugs in the same family, but not the profiled drug. Also assigned when the effect occurs in some limited patient populations and not in others.
• Case reports: This means that an effect has been documented to happen, but only has been seen in isolated cases.
• Rare: This means that an effect is seen in less than 2 percent of patients. Another way to look at this is that 98 percent of people will take the medicine and NOT have the effect.
• Infrequent: An effect that is seen in 2 to 10 percent of patients.
• Frequent: These effects happen in more than 10 percent of patients.