What are the actual differences between name brand and generic/store brand medicines?
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Sometimes, fillers and binders are the only real difference apart from packaging. In some cases this can actually matter with respect to allergies.
***TL;DR:*** *The real only actual difference is marketing, but that’s actually a huge difference even if the content of the pill is pretty much exactly the same.*
Marketing includes advertising, and flyer coupons, and shelving location, and packaging, and sales promotions, and it all tries to create higher levels of awareness and the impression to a lot of people that the “brand name” is more trusted and therefore worth paying a lot more for.
Painkillers are a good example.
Name brands like “Aspirin” contain the same “acetylsalicylic acid” content as generic or drugstore-branded versions of “ASA”. The difference is that an awful lot of people recognize the word “aspirin” thanks to it being pounded into our heads over many decades of taking it ourselves as a child and then seeing the ads for it to reinforce it, and seeing it on a really obvious place on the shelf in the drug store, either at the end of a row or right there at most peoples’ eye level.
The same is true for Advil (medicine name is “Ibuprofen”) or Tylenol (“Acetaminophen” or “Paracetamol”) or Aleve (“Naproxen”). In almost all stores where there’s a dedicated painkiller section, those drugs are sold in both branded and generic format, but the branded versions are found with more colorful and larger visual elements on the shelf… and a corresponding higher price.
The drug companies also work hard to come up with novel ways to add “features” (example: easy-to-swallow caplets rather than pills, or fast-acting gelcaps rather than solid tablets) that upsell their product over the generic versions. There might be mild differences in how the drug is delivered, but the active ingredient is still the same.
Marketing. They are for the most part chemically identical. When a new drug is created, the company that made it has a patent that says that no one else can use that formula for a certain number of years (I can’t remember how many at the moment). This is so the company that created the drug can recover their research and development costs. Once that patent is up, anyone can make the medicine and they will charge a much lower price since the cost of the actual ingredients is not that much money.
As others have pointed out, there are no differences in the active ingredient in generic or brand name medicines. The other ingredients may be different. Both are highly regulated, so the effects should be the same with both versions. There are some exceptions though. The most notorious one I know of is thyroid medication. The same dose of Synthroid can have very different effects than the different generic forms of levothyroxine. It is important to pay attention to which version you’re getting with this drug.
Source: am doctor who specializes in conditions requiring levothyroxine
[https://www.huffpost.com/entry/generic-prescriptions_n_6730194](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/generic-prescriptions_n_6730194)
**Q: Do generics have to have the same recipe, effect, side effects?** A: “The generics have to have the number of milligrams of drug that is included on the label in the pills. You can take it to the bank that that does not vary. In addition, the pill needs to get you within 10 percent above or below the blood concentrations achieved with the brand for the FDA to approve the generic, and in reality, they only usually vary by 3-4 percent in one direction or another. So yes, they are very similar in terms of the active ingredient. It is possible that one generic will get you a 3 percent lower concentration than the brand and another can get you a concentration that is 3 percent above the brand and therefore the two generics can be 6% different from each other. Most people will never notice a difference.
“According to the FDA, generic drugs do not need to contain the same inactive ingredients as the brand name product. Inactive ingredients are those that have nothing to do with the therapeutic action of the drug; binding materials, dyes, preservatives, and flavoring agents. That’s why sometimes a pill you have been taking will suddenly look different. It usually means a different manufacturer has made that pill than the one you had before. Also, given individual variations, a person can have an allergic reaction to an inactive ingredient in one generic and not another.”
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