Time to renew your vagifem? Forgot that daily dose of carfilzomib? Asked your pharmacist for digoxin when you meant digitoxin?
The medicine word salads in Prescription Drug Land have baffled malady sufferers since long before Romanian chemist Laza Edeleanu first synthesized his tongue-twisting phenylisopropylamine (aka amphetamine) in 1887.
But, believe it or not, there is a method to the methylprednisolone madness. Health regulators like the U.S. Food & Drug Administration have strict rules about branding a medication—notably, it can’t sound too much like a different medication (to avoid prescription mistakes), it can’t make medical claims and it can’t be overly promotional.
Nor can a name imply unfounded superiority to other similar drugs, which is why the FDA rejected the insulin name NovoRapid due to the suggestion it was faster-acting than other insulins (it eventually became NovoLog).
Pharmaceutical companies put a lot of thought into naming their drugs, according to the National Library of Medicine. They want them to be easy to pronounce in other languages (hence the scarcity of letters H, J and W) and not unintentionally translate to something offensive. The letters X, Y and Z are popular because they sound science-y, according to the National Center for Biotechnology Information. Products aimed toward women may have the letters S, M and L, as they’re soft-sounding, according to the NCBI, which cites birth-control pills birth control pills Alesse, Yasmin, Seasonale as examples.
While a name can’t be overly promotional, it can imply the intended outcome of the drug—for instance, Lunestra includes “lune” (French for moon) in naming its insomnia medication and anti-depressant Prozac starts with “pro,” Latin for “on behalf of” and generally associated with helpfulness or positivity.
Generic names for medications, meanwhile, often indicate to doctors a medical function of the drug, according to Pfizer.com. For instance, sildenafil—which Pfizer markets as Viagra—is among several erectile-dysfunction generics whose name contains “afil,” which in medical terms means it helps control blood flow.
Still for every lyrical-sounding Lyrica, there’s a headache-inducing Ipratropium bromide. And for that headache, take two Tylenol, named from the compound acetyl–para-aminophenol.
