Drugs.com is an online pharmaceutical encyclopedia that provides drug information for consumers and healthcare professionals, primarily in the United States. It self-describes its information as "accurate and independent" yet limited to being "for educational purposes only and is not intended for medical advice, diagnosis or treatment."

Website

The Drugs.com website is owned and operated by the Drugsite Trust, a privately held Trust administered by two

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pharmacists, Karen Ann and Phillip James Thornton. Operated on the

IBM Cloud IBM Cloud, (formerly known as Bluemix) is a set of cloud computing services for business offered by the information technology company IBM. Services As of 2021, IBM Cloud contains more than 170 services including compute, storage, network ...

, Drugs.com provides information on some 24,000 drugs, was visited by 50 million users per month in 2021, and has a

download In computer networks, download means to ''receive'' data from a remote system, typically a server such as a web server, an FTP server, an email server, or other similar system. This contrasts with uploading, where data is ''sent to'' a remote ...

time of one second. The site contains a library of reference information which includes content from

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, Truven Health Analytics, U.S.

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(FDA), AHFS, Harvard Health Publications,

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, and Animalytics (a

veterinary Veterinary medicine is the branch of medicine that deals with the prevention, management, diagnosis, and treatment of disease, disorder, and injury in animals. Along with this, it deals with animal rearing, husbandry, breeding, research on nutri ...

products database). Drugs.com is certified by the

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online privacy certification program and the HONcode of

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. The Drugs.com encyclopedia contains drug information for consumers, a portal for drugs based on diseases, a health professionals database of drug monographs, a

natural product A natural product is a natural compound or substance produced by a living organism—that is, found in nature. In the broadest sense, natural products include any substance produced by life. Natural products can also be prepared by chemical sy ...

s database, and a poison control center. Drugs.com is not affiliated with any

pharmaceutical companies The pharmaceutical industry discovers, develops, produces, and markets drugs or pharmaceutical drugs for use as medications to be administered to patients (or self-administered), with the aim to cure them, vaccinate them, or alleviate symptoms. ...

History

The domain Drugs.com was originally registered by Bonnie Neubeck in 1994. In 1999 at the height of the dotcom boom, Eric MacIver purchased an option to buy the domain from Neubeck. In August 1999, MacIver sold the domain at auction for US$823,666 to Venture Frogs, a startup incubator run by Tony Hsieh and Alfred Lin, best known for their involvement in LinkExchange and later

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. Venture Frogs sold the Drugs.com domain name to a private investor in June 2001, allowing Hsieh and Lin to focus on Zappos.com. The Drugs.com website was officially launched in September 2001. In March 2008, Drugs.com announced the release of Mednotes — an online personal medication record application which connected to

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(On June 24, 2011 Google announced it was retiring Google Health on January 1, 2012). In May 2010, U.S. FDA announced a collaboration with Drugs.com to distribute consumer health updates on the Drugs.com website and mobile platform. In February 2016, comScore stated that Drugs.com was the sixth most popular health network receiving approximately 23 million visitors for the month, while Searchmetrics listed Drugs.com in the top 100 US websites for search visibility. In April 2017,

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listed Drugs.com as the Health Information Website Brand of the Year.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Drugs.Com American medical websites American companies established in 2001 Health care companies established in 2001 Internet properties established in 2001 Drugs