Generic drugs?

biscit

dmg24 wrote: »

Geordie_bear, what do you intend to achieve by complaining?

This seems to be a case of either a badly informed sales assistant or bad business practice.

If people don't point these things out, they never get fixed.

At worse he gets fobbed off.

At best, the substance of the complaint gets taken on board and Boots improve thier training and/or policies. The world is in a small way a better place. I'd call that worthwhile.

Nothing is to be gained by doing nothing.

[Deleted User]

http://www.nurofen.co.uk/products.php

Look on here to see what you bought. It will show the ingredients.

From this you can tell us exactly what you purchased - that way you can also look out to see if you can buy a cheaper alternative in future.

[Deleted User]

Just found this on Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nurofen

Looks like Boots make Nurofen Plus (the one with codeine in it).

I do personally prefer this Nurofen to the basic one as it has codeine in it but I just stick to Ibuprofen 600mg as it's cheaper.

fluffnutter

As far as I'm concerned the jury's still out on whether brand drugs are better than generic ones.

I was always of the opinion that brand drugs were more expensive because the drug company had to recoup the (very expensive) cost of research and development. After a number of years, the chemical composition of a drug is no longer under trademark, hence other companies can produce the same product for cheaper.

It's also worth bearing in mind that many of the 'generic' drugs are still produced by the 'branded' companies; they just market products for different user groups.

Both of these arguments would suggest that you're getting a good deal with no detriment to your health by buying the cheaper generic drug.

However, I read an interesting article suggesting that, despite what you'd think about incredibly stringent quality control, the active ingredient in any particular drug can vary enormously and still be within the acceptable range. They measure the amount of drug that gets into the bloodstream and apparently a variance of +/- 20% is acceptable.

The study that this article was quoting suggested that cheaper drugs generally had a lower proportion of the active ingredient. In addition, the quality of the other non-active ingredients could often by poorer as well. I don't know for sure; I'm not a medical expert... but I do know that too much about the drug industry is shrouded in secrecy.

4743hudsonj

Not sure if its been said but some more expensive drugs contain caffeine and similar drugs to give the illusion of a better effect, they also have stuff to help them be absorbed faster, but in the end of the day they do all indeed do the same thing. 16p Wilkinson drugs FTW

EDIT: im pretty sure their was a study thta showed that drugs with a well known brand like Nurofen carry a placebo effect that actually encourage the person to think they're better faster,

sweetstudent

As i recall Boots own Crooks Healthcare, which in turn own Nurofen!

neilmcl

Just so you guys know, Nurofen IS a Boots own product. In fact ibruprofen in general was originally developed by Boots.

Littlemiss27

neilmcl wrote: »

Just so you guys know, Nurofen IS a Boots own product.

It used to be but Nurofen has been owned by Reckitt Benckiser since about 2005/6.