Are you googling ‘side effects’ of your medicine even before you’ve left the doctor’s office? But did you know that every chemical (laboratory-made or naturally occurring) taken into our bodies can have a series of effects? We hope some of these effects will cure diseases or disorders of the body and mind.

So when you pop a Paracetamol into your mouth, you know it will reduce your fever. It might also give you acid reflux (a common secondary effect of the chemical), and to prevent that, you might also take an antacid. But it is worth the risk because you would rather brave acidity than spend all night burning up with fever (particularly with that early morning meeting marked on your calendar).

For some regularly used medicine, health workers have a fairly comprehensive understanding of the various effects it can have. Although every now and then, new ones do crop up. Only eight months ago, there were safety warnings issued for the painkiller Meftal, which was found to cause a syndrome called Drug Reaction with Eosinophilia and Systemic Symptoms (listen to the episode to find out what this is!). How did we find this out? There is an entire branch of medical assessment called Pharmacovigilance that aims to improve medicine safety and research on adverse drug reactions. The more we understand the effects of various medicines, the safer our administration can become.

In this episode, Dr Kausik Maiti, executive director of Safety Medical Sciences at Parexel (one of the largest clinical research organisations in the world), explains the importance and scope of pharmacovigilance. He also discusses why the reporting of adverse drug reactions in India is one of the lowest in the world and what you, as a patient, can do to improve the situation.

Tune in to find out how researchers are working to improve the safety profiles of medicine and whether an antiemetic (nausea medicine) can really give you the urge to gamble!

Produced by Anna Priyadarshini

Sound mix by Kapil Dev Singh