A drug by any other name

We agree that most physicians are more familiar with the brand names of the drugs they prescribe than with the generic names; their patients and colleagues often refer to drugs by their brand name. For a medical journal, however, identifying drugs by their brand name is problematic. First, a given drug may have several brand names. Second, readers of CMAJ in other countries might not know the brand names used in Canada, as drugs are often marketed under different names in different countries. Thus, unless the brand name is critical to the manuscript (for example, a case report in which a particular brand of a drug is implicated), we prefer to use only the generic name.