| Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences |
Background In the past few years the number of drugs and medicines has increased enormously in Pakistan. The market is flooded with over 50,000 medicinal products approved for marketing by the Registration Board. Health care professionals as well as consumers are thereby exposed to a large number of drugs which are creating an increased potential for toxicity and undesirable effects and putting the consumers’ health at risk. Whereas on one hand access to these potent substances has increased but on the other availability and access to the unbiased information, their usage and toxicity management has not been established at all in Pakistan. This factor has resulted in an increasing demand from the health care professionals for independent, commercially unbiased and evaluated information on medicines and drug therapy. Drugs without essential information emanating from biased quarters could be fraught with safety problems. Availability of drug information is limited only to pharmacology textbooks, local commercial drug guides compiled by non-professionals or pharmaceutical companies' drug promotion materials. Generally over worked prescribers are too pre-occupied to spare time for searching authentic information and may not even have access to drug formularies. The information provided by the pharmaceutical industries is "product promotion oriented" and hence not reliable. Moreover these companies in Pakistan are not serious to provide complete information to prescribers when requested. Despite of below mentioned enormous number of medical facilities in Public sector in Punjab there is not even a single functioning Drug Information Centre in Lahore.
Drug & Poison Information Center at Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences, UVAS, Lahore
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