How do medicines get their name?

Question

I have yet to meet Mr Prozac and Miss Viagra.

Answer 1

It is MR. VIAGRA, not Miss.

How they are named is a mystery to me, and I have been practicing medicine a long time.  The generic names at least give you some information as to the class of drug- antibiotic, proton pump inhibitor, etc.  The brand names have no apparent system- If there is one, I have missed it.

Answer 2

well in most cases from their latin root if you search a medicines name in like google latin info will come up about 74% of the time

Answer 3

There are two main ways. The first way is based off what ingredients are active in it. They'll slightly modify the names of the main active ingredients. The other way they sometimes name them is by naming it after what it's called Like Flomax.  A urine medication. lol Nasonex. A nose related medication. Rhinocort. Treats the Rhino virus. I'm sorry, but I cant think of any examples for names based off ingredients off the top of my head. I might've spelt some of the medication names wrong. I hope I helped.

Answer 4

I agree with the respondents who said Latin.

This was the reason I replied(in health) that Latin is a subject useful for nursing in addition to math, English,&biology.

Latin as an "extra" can be useful for many subjects,Anatomy, biology and horticulture as well.

Answer 5

all i know is that medicines have a brand name and a generic name....^_^

Answer 6

Normally the person who discovers the medicine will name it. It does not have to be named after them.

Answer 7

The people who discover them name them after themselves

Answer 8

Lostie has got the gist of it, most medicines have very complicated chemical names for a start, the humble aspirin is acectylsalasylic acid.

Few are actually named after the person who discovered it, I can't think of any off the top of my head, and Latin has it's roots in many of them which helps associate the name with the complaint, like Audicort for ear infections Optrex for eyes, they all help the memory process, this is especially important for GP's who have about 2,000 prescription medicines to choose from.

When a new pharmaceutical product is marketed, it costs the company a lot of money to register a new name, so there are a list of 'off the shelf' names that a company can browse through that sound familiar to save costs. For example, a company I worked for produced a de-congestant based on the compound dexbrompheniramine (see what I mean about chemical names), they called it 'Halin' which is easily associated with 'inhaling' but does not mean anything in itself.

I wonder how many medicines 'Found' has used, how many perhaps have saved his life or family members, pharmaceutical companies are businesses, not charities, most of their profits are spent on researching new products to look after him and his kind.

.

Answer 9

Modern medicines get names like any other product e.g. cars. specialists think them up and check that no other company has registered them before (an industry in itself) and that the names don't have any bad connotations in foreign languages.

Actually medicines have many names, there's the IUPAC chemical name that actually describes the molecule.  Then there's the 'generic' name often derived from the chemical name.  Finally the trade mark name is what is advertised.

Answer 10

The pharmaceutical fat cats actually hire people to make up names for their sh*t.

See, these names make you FEEL something...pro! for happy yaya happy, and via!--vavavajayjay...totally made by humans at a job making money--I would love that job--what fun.

Answer 11

The companies' marketing departments figure out the brand names. They have wide lattitude, though occasionally they'll cross the FDA and have to go back to the drawing board. The more drugs there are, the more imagination they have to use. Gone are the days of Atarax (literally "without a care" for an antihistamine marketed to treat anxiety symptoms) and Premarin (an estrogen hormone replacement originally extracted from pregnant mare urine).