About MedUnfold

How to read a medicine page

Medicine pages always follow the same order, from the simplest layer to the most detailed one. Stop wherever you have enough:

• An analogy: an everyday comparison that gives you the shape of it before any technical language.
• In simple terms: what the medicine changes in the body, said plainly.
• In depth: the fuller mechanism, for readers who want the detail.
• Animation: where a page has one, the mechanism unfolds step by step. You can pause it, and it follows your system's “reduce motion” setting. Two medicines that share an animation share a mechanism, which does not make them the same medicine or interchangeable.
• Approved uses: listed country by country or region by region, each with the regulator that approved it. Approval is decided separately in each place, so the uses can differ.
• Target: the protein, receptor, enzyme or pathway the medicine acts on, and why that matters here.
• Official sources: every document a page was built from is named, linked and attributed to its publisher, so you can read what we read.

How the content is made

The same rules apply to every published page:

• Every page is written from official documents — regulators, official product information, government health sources — not translated from another language. Translation is the fallback, for a language with no official source to write from.
• A page is published only after at least two independent official sources agree with each other. Two institutions that publish the same document count once, not twice.
• Approved uses and the mechanism are checked medicine by medicine. Shared material, such as a pathway explanation or an animation, is reused only where it has been confirmed to fit that medicine.
• Pages describe one medicine at a time. They do not compare or rank medicines, do not suggest that one can stand in for another, and give no dosing advice for an individual case.

How company profiles are written

Where a company page exists, its profile is that company's own description of itself from its own website, or a faithful translation of it. Nothing is added that the company has not said about itself. If that description cannot be checked, no profile is shown and the page carries only the link to the company's website.

What is published here

These figures are counted from the published pages while the site is built. Catalogues differ by language, because approval does:

• 176medicines explained in this language
• 876medicine pages published across all languages
• 7languages published

Sources and accuracy

A medicine page names the documents it was built from. This list is counted from those documents, institution by institution, across the pages published in this language:

• DailyMed, U.S. National Library of Medicine
• European Medicines Agency
• Health Canada
• Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (EMC)
• MedlinePlus, U.S. National Library of Medicine
• National Cancer Institute
• U.S. Food and Drug Administration

Approved uses follow the labelling in force in each region, and labelling changes over time. If anything on a page disagrees with the document it cites, the document governs.

Not medical advice

MedUnfold is educational content about how medicines work. It does not say whether a medicine is right for you, it does not compare medicines with each other, and it does not replace the prescribing information in your country or the advice of your doctor or pharmacist. Always follow your local prescribing information.