A tale of too many strengths: Can we minimize prescribing errors and dispensing errors with so many formulations in the market?

Address for correspondence: Gitanjali B, Department of Pharmacology, Jawaharlal Institute of Postgradute Medical Education and Research, Pondicherry – 605 006, India. E-mail: [email protected] There are reportedly more than 1,00,000 drug formulations in the market in India. I have not seen a complete list of all the formulations nor been able to verify this fi gure which has remained unchanged since my days as a postgraduate (which was a very long time ago). However, anyone who has had the patience to look at the branded formulations in any one of the indexing drug formularies will be convinced that this fi gure could be correct. One of the recent issues of Indian Drug Review (IDR) had approximately 1980 medicines listed under the alphabet ‘A’.[1] Some other alphabets had much longer lists. So what is wrong with a country having such a large number of medicines, in different dosage formulations of varying strengths?