Homeopathy

Sounds fucken ace to me. I'm on a branded, patented, variant of a drug I found out about thanks, one imagines, to their marketing of it to consumers, since I first heard of it on a user forum. If they hadn't drawn users attention to it directly, I certainly would never have been put on it by my doctor, since NHS prescribing is done on generics by default. It's a small but important variation, just a different preparation of the same active ingredient, but it allows me to get the same therapeutic benefit with a lower dose and hence reduced side effects. The extra cost to the NHS is of the order of tens of pounds per year, up to maybe a couple of hundred for users on the highest dosing regime, so they have no incentive to draw patients attention to it, especially as hardly anybody has side effects which impose further costs on the NHS

We have pretty tight regulation of the claims which manufacturers can include in their marketing, and however much a punter might still be misled by claims they can still be refused the product by their doctor if the doctor knows its wrong for them, so I can't see any harm in letting patients have access to information, which in practice means letting PharmCos advertise directly to the public. There will be some patients who waste doctors' time asking for stuff which is inappropriate, but there will likely be just as many who receive improved care as a result of going into the surgery with ideas which time-constrained doctors might otherwise have overlooked.

Oh, and my other drug I insist on being prescribed the branded product because it tastes nicer than the generic. It's that kind of selfishness which puts the NHS drugs budget through the roof :-)

Yeah thats ace and all, and I'm really glad you've found a good drug that works well for you, but as previously discussed on this thread quite a lot of what a drug does is down to you, as blind tests with placebos show.
This sounds patronising, sorry, but you can see my point, that if you prescribed the own brand drug in the branded box, it might do the same thing? (thats a big might by the way)
I would say it would be interesting to test it out, but its your life innit. Do you ever wonder when taking the drug if (for example it was aspirin) its effect seemed lessened in someway that you might get super paranoid and wonder if the more expensive drugs had been substituted for cheaper ones?