Brand Name Drug or Generic Prescription Drug

Is a brand name drug better than a generic prescription drug? Below are some differences between a branded drug and a generic drug.

A branded drug is a medicine with a trade name and is produced by a well established pharmaceutical company while a generic drug is the bioequivalent of the branded drug; the generic name is the actual chemical name present in the drug.

Both the branded and the generic drug contain the active ingredient; they only differ in the other non-active components present in the medicine.

A branded drug is expensive because the pharmaceutical company that manufactured it spends a lot of money on research to come up with a new medicine suited to alleviate a particular illness or health condition. After the research, a huge amount of money is needed to have it approved by the government and to introduce it to the market.

A generic drug is generally cheaper than the branded drug because it doesn’t have to spend on research because an extensive study has been done by the pharmaceutical company that produced the branded medicine. It doesn’t have to spend too much on marketing because the branded drug has been introduced already; all they need is to make people know that a generic drug exists.

Although, generic drugs are cheaper than the branded drugs, we have to ask our physician if we could have it as a replacement for the drugs prescriptions given to us because although the generic drug has the same active ingredient we cannot be sure about the side effects of the other non active components present in the generic drug.