You fill a prescription with a brand-name medication. The pills are light-blue ovals that come in a plastic bottle. When the generic version becomes available, your insurance company insists that you purchase only that, and your doctor agrees.
This time, the pills are round, white and come in a carboard blister pack. If the medicine works the same, who cares?
Two physicians writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, argue that we all should.
They say letting generics look like the brand name original makes for safer and even more effective medicine.
The doctors argue against a practice called “trade dress.” The term refers to federal laws that protect the unique appearance of brand-name drugs by prohibiting generic pharmaceutical manufacturers from making similar-looking pills or designing similar packaging.
The researchers accept that trade dress has played a meaningful role in keeping drugs safe. It can prevent different medications from being mistaken for each other, thwart counterfeiting and prevent shady pharmacists from making unauthorized substitutions of generic for brand-name drugs and skimming the extra profit for themselves.
But drugs that are supposed to perform one way but look different every time you refill the prescription, suggest researchers Jeremy Greene and Aaron Kesselheim, can lead to medication errors, can be unnecessarily more expensive and can diminish the generic drugs’ effectiveness, thanks to the placebo effect not kicking in for the generic drug.
A placebo, or “fake” drug, is a sugar pill or other inert substance used in medical trials to test different treatments among trial subjects who are unaware if they are being given medicine or something that just looks like it. Often, however, patients receiving the placebo respond positively, sometimes strongly so.
As reported on MedPage Today, The NEJM researchers note that “A resurgence of research on the placebo effect suggests that drug appearance can have a distinct functionality.” They say a medication’s packaging and the perceived dollar value of products can influence a product’s effectiveness as well.
So because one medicine that always looks different can be confusing, because generics make up about 70% of all U.S. prescriptions but less than 20% of prescription-drug costs and because a patient’s mind is a powerful player in his or her ability to heal an ailing body, the researchers support amending regulations to permit generic drugs to resemble their brand-name counterparts.
Such changes would codify a consistent, organized system of pill appearance that would:
- simplify the complexity of certain medical regimens;
- encourage the use of generic drugs when appropriate; and
- increase a patient’s ability to take the medication as directed.
