How we source these pages
Every factual claim on a medication page comes from a document published by a government regulator, and every page names the document.
The source documents
The primary source is the FDA-approved label: the prescribing information for prescription medications, and the Drug Facts label for products sold over the counter. These are the documents a manufacturer files and the FDA approves, and they are the closest thing that exists to an authoritative statement about what a medication is approved to do.
We read them through two public services of the US National Library of Medicine: openFDA, which serves the labels as data, and DailyMed, which serves the original documents. Both are public records of the US government.
The split between what is automatic and what is written is deliberate:
- Approved uses, strengths, dosing, warnings, contraindications, interactions and boxed warnings are taken from the label automatically and are never retyped by hand.
- Whether an approved generic exists is counted from the FDA application register, not from memory.
- Comparison tables are generated from the same label data, so a table cannot say something the label does not.
- Explanations, comparisons, notes on cost and answers to questions are written by us and labelled as ours.
Why we do not just reprint the label
A full FDA label runs to tens of thousands of words, and it is already published in full on DailyMed. Copying it here would produce a page that duplicates the original and helps nobody. Instead we take the summary sections that the regulator itself writes for the front of the label, present them in a readable order, and link to the full document for anyone who needs it.
This also keeps the site honest about its own scope. We show a slice of a long document, and we say so.
How current the data is
Every medication page shows the effective date of the label version it was built from, and links to the current document. Labels change, and a page built from an old version is a page that can be wrong. When the effective date on a page is far behind, that is visible on the page rather than hidden.
What we deliberately do not do
We do not say which of two medications is better. Where trials were run separately, against different comparators, in different populations, presenting their numbers as a ranking would misrepresent what the evidence supports.
We do not give dosing advice, we do not suggest what to take for a symptom, and we do not publish anything aimed at obtaining prescription medication without a prescription.
We do not credit a medical reviewer. Doing so without a clinician actually reviewing the page would be a lie, and a checkable one.
On the limits of a label
An FDA label describes what was approved and on what evidence. It is not a summary of everything known about a medication, it does not cover uses outside the approval, and it is not written to answer an individual person's question. Those are real limits, and no amount of presentation removes them. What a label is good for is settling questions of fact about what a regulator approved, and that is what this site uses it for.
Last updated: 29 July 2026