Follow these links to the previous and next pages.
‹ Drug Guide Index | The Basic Overview Page › >
Clicking on a link in the Table of Contents will take you to that section of the drug guide.

US Brand Name: The drug’s brand/trade/proprietary name in the United States

generic name: The drug’s generic/International Nonproprietary Name (INN)

Other Forms: However else it might be available in addition to the default tablet or capsule. E.g. Oral solution, intramuscular injection (IM).

Class: How we categorized the drug. For the most part it’s the same as the rest of pharmaco-medical-industrial complex. Celexa is an antidepressant (AD), Topamax is an antiepileptic drug (AED). Sometimes we go rogue and classify meds based on how they work and chemical structure and not just their approvals. E.g. We call Strattera an AD and will probably reclassify amoxapine as an antipsychotic.

We also have various sub-classes like serotonin-selective reuptake inhibitors (SSRI) and second-generation antipsychotics (SGA).

1.  Other brand names & branded generic names

This is where we list any other names we know of for a drug, either in the US or in other countries. We’ll indicate the countries where a name is used, if we have that information.
Branded generic is a complicated term and is explained as a footnote on all the pages, including this one¹.

2.  FDA Approved Uses

This is what a drug has official approval to be prescribed for in the US.

3.  Off-Label Uses

This is what a drug is prescribed for that it doesn’t have approval for in the US. This includes the clinically significant (i.e. it often works, but for a variety of reasons there’s not enough money to be made to justify the costs of getting FDA approval), the interesting, the complete failures, the dangerous, the desperation moves, and the just plain bizarre. Most of the time there will be links to studies, case reports, etc. to give you an idea of how likely an off-label use might work, is worth exploring, that someone actually did that, etc.

4.  Pros and cons

These should be easy enough to figure out. Please don’t base your decision on whether or not to take a med on this section and side effects alone.

5.  Side Effects

These are nowhere near all the potential side effects a med can have. Just a representative sample.

5.1  Typical Side Effects

Practically everyone who takes this drug will get one or more of these.

5.2  Not So Common Side Effects

You may or may not get one or more of these. Don’t be surprised either way.

5.3  Freaky Rare Side Effects

Included for gallows humor. These are real side effects, either from the PI sheet (no link) or case reports (with a link to the case report). “Rare” means fewer than one person in 10,000 gets one of these.
After reading the PI sheets of well over a hundred meds, as well as being somewhat jaded before the crazy took over my life in late 2001, my idea “freaky” might be far different than yours.

6.  Interesting Stuff Your Doctor Probably Won’t Tell You

Sometimes useful, often not. Especially when it’s a bunch of nutjobs who determine what is “interesting.”

Let’s not forget about the ads. Google went through a lot of trouble to have those spy satellites collect information about you so they could precisely determine which ads you’ll be most likely to respond to.

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7.  Dosage and How to Take the Drug

For each approved application we’ll give you what the drug company recommends right out of the PI sheet, followed by our suggestion.
The main difference between the two is practically the same, no matter what the med:

• We often suggest starting at a lower dosage than the drug companies do.
• We usually suggest increasing your dosage not only at a slower rate, but only if you need to increase it.
• Most medications have a target dosage, our target dosage is the one where your symptoms stopped.

We may have suggestions for clinically significant off-label uses as well.
All dosage suggestions are for adults, and are just that, suggestions for you to discuss with your doctor as part of your treatment plan.
How to take the drug is along the lines of with or without food, in the morning or at night, once or twice a day, etc. Most of the time it’s exactly the same as you’ll find in the PI sheet.

8.  How Long a Drug Takes to Work

This is our best guess, based on consumer experiences, information from the books & websites in the bibliography, and the PI sheet.

9.  Half-Life & Average Time to Clear Out of Your System

The half-life is usually from the PI sheet. The average time to clear out of your system is approximately the half-life times five. We’ll be explaining this in excruciating detail on a page about pharmacokinetics.

10.  How to Stop Taking a Drug

Our suggestion, so you have something to compare with what your doctor recommends. Unless they have a better idea in the PI sheet, which they usually don’t, or the drug has a generally accepted discontinuation plan, we start with this rule of thumb:
Decrease the dosage by the standard titration amount (whatever the PI sheet tells you to increase the dosage by when you start taking it) the average time it takes to clear from your system.
For example: with most SSRIs that works out to reducing your dosage by 10–20mg a day every five to six days.

11.  Days to Reach a Steady State

How long until you reach the point where most of the effects associated with peaks and valleys of having more-than-usual (right after you take it) and less-than-usual (right before your next dose) amounts in your system smooth out.

12.  How a Drug Works

This isn’t on every page. We do our best to explain the experts’ best guesses.

13.  How a Likely a Drug Will Work

This isn’t on every page. We do our best to give you some realistic odds of how well meds work for various conditions, including off-label applications.

14.  How a Drug Compares with Other Meds

This isn’t on every page. These will be links to various studies comparing a drug with other drugs.

15.  Comments

Whatever else there is to write about.

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After that it’s comments members of the Crazy Meds forum may have on the drug and/or the article, links to the section of the forum about the drug, a link to the US PI sheet and any other PI sheets we can find, a link to a drug-drug interaction checker, and the bibliography.

‹ Drug Guide Index | The Basic Overview Page › >
Follow these links to the previous and next pages.

¹ The term "branded generic" has three meanings:
1) A generic drug produced by a generics manufacturer that is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the company that makes the branded version. E.g. Greenstone Pharmaceuticals makes gabapentin, and they are owned by Pfizer, who also own Parke-Davis, the makers of Neurontin.
2) A branded generic is also a generic drug given a 'brand' name by the manufacturer (e.g. Teva's Budeprion), but otherwise has the same active ingredient as the original branded version (Wellbutrin).
3) A branded generic is also a generic drug given a 'brand' name by the manufacturer (e.g. Sanofi-Aventis' Aplenzin, which is bupropion hydrobromide) and uses a salt of the active ingredient that is different from the original branded version and other generics (Wellbutrin, Budeprion and all the others are bupropion hydrochloride). We aren't sure if that really makes a difference or not. The FDA says they're the same thing. As usual, the data are contradictory, but most evidence indicates that the FDA is right and the differences are negligible.
For our purposes a "branded generic name" refers to the second and third definitions.

Page created by: Jerod Poore. Date created: 31 July 2011 Last edited by:

Page design and explanatory material by Jerod Poore, copyright © 2004 - 2012. All rights reserved.

Almost all of the material on this site is by Jerod Poore and is copyright © 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012 Jerod Poore. Except, of course, the PI sheets - those are the property of the drug companies who developed the drugs the sheets are about - and any documents that are written by other people which may be posted to this site will remain the property of the original authors. You cannot reproduce this page or any other material on this site outside of the boundaries of fair use copying without the express permission of the copyright holder. That’s usually me, so just ask first. That means if want to print out a few pages to take to your doctor, therapist, counselor, support group, non-understanding family members or something like that - then that’s OK to just do. Go for it! Please. As long as you include this copyright notice and the following disclaimer, I’m usually cool with it.

All rights reserved. No warranty is expressed or implied in this information. Consult one or more doctors and/or pharmacists before taking, or changing how you take any neurological and/or psychiatric medication. Your mileage may vary. What happened to us won’t necessarily happen to you.
The information on Crazy Meds pertains to and is intended for adults. While some information about children and adolescents is occasionally presented (e.g. US FDA approvals), pediatric-specific data such as dosages, side effects, off-label applications, etc. are rarely included in the articles on drugs or discussed on the forum. If you are looking for information regarding meds for children you’ll have to go somewhere else.
Know your sources!
Nobody on this site is a doctor, therapist, or a pharmacist. We don’t portray them either here or on TV. Only doctors can diagnose and treat an illness. Some doctors tend to get pissed off by patients who know too much about medications, so tread lightly when and where appropriate. Diagnosing yourself from a website is like defending yourself in court, you suddenly have a fool for a doctor. Don’t be a cyberchondriac, thinking you have every disease you see a website about, or that you’ll get every side effect from every medication¹. Self-prescribing is as dangerous as buying meds from fraudulent online pharmacies that promise you medications without prescriptions.
All information on this site has been obtained through our personal experience and the experiences family, friends, what people have reported on various reputable sites all over teh intergoogles, the medications’ product information / summary of product characteristic (PI/SPC) sheets, and from sources that are referenced throughout the site. As such the information presented here is not intended as a substitute for real medical advice from your real doctor, just a compliment to it. You should never, ever, replace what a real doctor tells you with something from a website on the Internet. The farthest you should ever take it is getting a second opinion from another real doctor. Educate yourself - always read the PI/SPC sheet or patient information leaflet (PIL) that comes with your medications and never ever throw them away.
Crazy Meds is not responsible for the content of sites we provide links to. We like them, or they’re paid advertisements, or they’re something else we think you should read to help you make an informed decision about a particular med. Sometimes they’re more than one of those things. But what’s on those sites is their business, not ours.
Very little information about visitors to this site is collected or saved. From time to time I look at search terms used and which pages they bring up in an effort to make the information I present more relevant. And the country of origin, just because I’m geeky like that. That’s about it. Depending on how you feel about Schrodinger, our privacy policy should either assuage or exacerbate your paranoia.
All brand names of the drugs listed in this site are the trademarks of the companies named on the PI/SPC sheet associated with the medication, sometimes on the pages about the drugs, even though those companies may have been acquired by other companies who may or may not be listed in this site by the time you read this. Or the rights to the drug were sold to another company. And any or all of the companies involved may have changed their names.
Crazy Meds is optimized for the browser you’re not using on the platform you wish you had. Between you and me, it all looks a lot cleaner using Firefox or Safari, which is what a plurality of visitors use. And I’m running Windows XP3. On a computer that sits on top of my desk. With a 23 inch monitor. Hey, at least you can make the text larger or smaller by clicking on the + or - buttons in the upper right hand corner. If you have Java enabled. Like 99% of the websites on the planet, Crazy Meds is hosted on domain running an open source operating system with a variety of open source applications, including the software used to display what you’ve been reading. As such Crazy Meds is not responsible for whatever weird shit your browser does or does not do when you read this site².
No neurologists, psychiatrists, therapists or pharmacists were harmed in the production of this website. Use only as directed. Void where prohibited. Contains nuts. Certain restrictions may apply. All data are subject to availability. Not available on all mobile devices or in all dimensions of reality.

‘Everything is true, nothing is permitted.’ - Jerod Poore

¹ While there are plenty of books to help you with hypochondria, for some reason there’s not much in the way of websites. Then again, staying off of the Internet is a large part of curing/managing the disorder.

² Have I mentioned how open source operating systems for commercial applications is one of the dumbest ideas in the history of dumb ideas?
[begin rant] I rent a dedicated server for Crazy Meds. It’s sitting on a rack somewhere in Southern California along with a bunch of other servers that other people have rented. The hardware is identical, but no two machines have exactly the same operating systems. I don’t even need to see what is on any of the others to know this. If somebody got their server at the exact same time, with the exact same features as I did, I’m confident that there would be noticeable differences in some aspects of the operating systems. So what does this mean? For one thing it means that no two computers in the same office of a single company have the same operating system, and the techs can spend hours figuring out what the fuck the problem could be based on that alone. It also means that application software like IP board that runs the forum here has to have so many fucking user-configurable bells and whistles that even when I read the manual I can’t find every setting, or every location that every flag needs to be set in order for a feature to run the way I want it to run. And in the real world it means you can get an MBA not only with an emphasis on resource planning, but with an emphasis on using SAP - a piece of software so complex there are now college programs on how to use it. You might think, “But don’t people learn how to use Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator in college?” Sure, in order to create stuff. And in a way you’re creating stuff with SAP. But do you get a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree with an emphasis on Photoshop?
Back in the Big Iron Age the operating systems were proprietary, and every computer that took up an entire room with a raised floor and HVAC system, and had less storage and processing power than an iPhone, had the same operating system as every other one, give or take a release level. But when a company bought application software like SAP, they also got the source code, which was usually documented and written in a way to make it easy to modify the hell out of it. Why? Because accounting principles may be the same the world over, and tax laws the same across each country and state, but no two companies have the same format for their reports, invoices, purchase orders and so forth. Standards existed and were universally ignored. If something went wrong it went wrong the same way for everyone, and was easy to track down. People didn’t need to take a college course to learn how to use a piece of software.
I’m not against the open source concept entirely. Back then all the programmers read the same magazines, so we all had the same homebrew utilities. We even had the forerunner to QR Code to scan the longer source code. Software vendors and computer manufacturers sponsored conventions so we could, among other things, swap recipes for such add-ons and utilities. While those things would make our lives easier, they had nothing to do with critical functions of the operating system. Unless badly implemented they would rarely cause key application software to crash and burn. Whereas today, with open source everything, who the hell knows what could be responsible some part of a system failing. [/end rant]