The laundry list of side effects at the end of TV drug ads, and the giant instruction sheets you get at the pharmacy, can often be befuddling. Informulary, a site launched this week in beta, is designed to fix that, and to provide an easy resource for evidence-based facts about popular medicines.
The site was founded by a team of independent researchers at Dartmouth College, who crunch data from clinical trials the Food and Drug Administration uses to approve drugs. Then they spell out the risks and benefits — in clear, plain language — on a single sheet called a DrugFactsBox like this one:
Their product is different from a lot of the drug information sites on the web for two important reasons: It's totally independent, so it's not funded by pharmaceutical companies like, for example, WebMD is. And it's presented in a meticulous but digestible format that reflects the available data behind drugs in a way that's easy to understand.
