i have the habit of looking up information about medicine i take, currently i’m using Medline Plus. (is this a good site? any recommendations?)
one thing i don’t understand is that often after a search there will be two entries. one is “drugname”, the other is “drugname (systemic)”. what’s the difference between these two? which one am i looking for?
for example when i search for “panadol”, i get : Acetaminophen and Acetaminophen (Systemic).
thanks.
The systemic one seems to be aimed at pharmacists, and the other one aimed at someone who just bought a pack and wants to know what to do with it.
According to my neurologist, systemic means affecting the whole body or system. For example, I was prescribed Prednisone as a systemic medicine to fight an inflamation of a herniated disc. The medicine reduced inflamations in my system as a whole. Today, I am scheduled for a steroid injection in my spine, designed as a more local treatment. She is using a variety of systemic and local treatments, including physical therapy.
Examples of non-systemic treatments are things like eye-drops, topical creams, nasal sprays, inhalers, and so on, which are only designed to affect a certain part of the body.
Libertarian and friedo are both correct about the general distinction between systemic and non-systemic drugs. In the case of the links you posted, however, it seems that both of them go to descriptions of the systemic formulation. The information presented is generally similar, but formatted differently and the Acetaminophen(Systemic) link has more information. The real difference seems to be that Medline has used two overlapping information providers to provide the text for their drug information pages.
thought that might be so, i needed the confirmation, what with the similar formatting and all. guess that means i can use either one in a future search. thanks everyone for the replies.