Freelancers and Medicine: What are Fixed Dose Combination Drugs?

Today I had eggs and toast for breakfast. I had my eggs on one side of my plate and the toast on the other side. Yet, if I were to go to McDonald’s and buy an “Egg McMuffin”, I could buy a sandwich with bread and eggs all in one. That is what is a Fixed Dose Combination (FDC) medicine.

Fixed Dose Combination (FDC) medicines are pills (usually a pill or a capsule) which take a few different medicines and put them all (typically two but it can sometimes be as many as three) into one pill. The convenience of this is that when you take that ONE pill, you are really taking as many as THREE pills at once, but they are all mashed into that one pill.

One would maybe think “how convenient.” Instead of taking one pill, then another and then another. All you need to do with an FDC pill is take ONE pill and you would have ALL THREE medicines in that ONE pill. How easy can that be? Right? Wrong.

The dangers to taking an FDC medicine is the AMOUNTS of each of the individual medicines inside of an FDC pill! An FDC CONTROLS FOR YOU how much of EACH of these medicines you will take. You have no choice. Its like the Egg McMuffin. You do not get to choose how much egg or how much muffin comes to you. It comes already made. The amounts of each of these two ingredients (the egg and the muffin) are fixed before you get your sandwich. Now, when we are dealing with sandwiches that may not be such a bad thing but when we are dealing with medicines that can be terrible. What if you need a little MORE of medicine “A” but a little LESS of medicine “B”? Well, if you take a medicine in which both medicine “A” and “B” are fixed in that one pill and you cannot change the amounts of each of the medicines in that one pill – you may be in trouble. The results can be a disaster. You might wind up taking MORE of medicine “A” than what you need or LESS of medicine “B” than what you need.

If your body needs different amount of different medicines you would be wiser to be a little more industrious, put in a little more effort and take the individual medicines individually. My mom used to say “the person who strives to do less work usually winds up working twice as hard” and I believe that this is what is happening with these FDC medicines. If you wish to work so little that you do not want to take the trouble to take two different pills (heaven forbid you might have to open your mouth twice and swallow two times!), you will maybe pay the price of having to work twice as hard to get over the problems you might have by taking too much or too little of a medicine in an FDC.

Why are we talking about this here today? Well, the Madras High Court today, March 23, 2016, banned 344 of these FDC medicines. If you wish to know which are the medicines which have been banned, you can find them at this link here. However the key is to take your time, take a little more effort and take each medicine that you need individually.

Now, how is all of this relevant to IndiaFreelancers.com? Well the reason it is relevant to our excellent and outstanding freelancers on IndiaFreelancers.com is because the future of medicine is in IT. More and more, medicine is going the way of programs and IT enhancements. CAT Scans, MRI Scans, Glucose Meters to test your blood sugar level, etc etc. Our world-class programmers on IndiaFreelancers.com would do well to keep an eye on the world of medicine. The next FDC that you may hear about, may be when someone is asking to hire you to make it easier for people to take their FDCs – and you will need to know what these medicines are if you wish to consider possibly accepting such a job.

Ranjiv P for IndiaFreelancers.com