A prescription drug (also prescription medication or prescription medicine) is a licensed medicine that is regulated by legislation to require a medical prescription before it can be obtained. The term is used to distinguish it from over-the-counter drugs which can be obtained without a prescription. Different jurisdictions have different definitions of what constitutes a prescription drug.
"Rx" is often used as a short form for prescription drug in North America. It is an abbreviation for the Latin "recipe", an imperative form of "recipere", meaning "take".
Prescription drugs are often dispensed together with a monograph (in Europe, a Patient Information Leaflet or PIL) that gives detailed information about the drug.
Read more about Prescription Drug: Regulation in United States, Regulation in United Kingdom, Regulation in Australia, Expiration Date, Environmental Problems
Famous quotes containing the words prescription and/or drug:
“Women are taught that their main goal in life is to serve others—first men, and later, children. This prescription leads to enormous problems, for it is supposed to be carried out as if women did not have needs of their own, as if one could serve others without simultaneously attending to one’s own interests and desires. Carried to its “perfection,” it produces the martyr syndrome or the smothering wife and mother.”
—Jean Baker Miller (20th century)
“While man can still his body keep
Wine or love drug him to sleep,
Waking he thanks the Lord that he
Has body and its stupidity....”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)