It depends on the medication. There are certainly plenty of generic medications that were originally designed for people that will work just fine for cats and dogs. But for animal specific meds, the short answer is that there just isn’t enough money in veterinary medical research. The demand just isn’t there to create a cheap generic alternative. Drug companies will create a formula that can help animals with specific problems, and then they patent the hell out of it and charge whatever they want. This happens with uncommon meds for people too. But you usually don’t hear about it because there aren’t that many people that need it. There are so many more generics for people because there is so much more money put into medical research for humans. Animal medicine is mostly built off of the research done for human medicine. So since it has less research and funding, you end up with a lot of expensive name brand meds for animal specific issues.
Huh? Generics only exist once the original patent has expired. There’s no research necessary because it’s the exact same medication, just produced by a different company.
It depends on the medication. There are certainly plenty of generic medications that were originally designed for people that will work just fine for cats and dogs. But for animal specific meds, the short answer is that there just isn’t enough money in veterinary medical research. The demand just isn’t there to create a cheap generic alternative. Drug companies will create a formula that can help animals with specific problems, and then they patent the hell out of it and charge whatever they want. This happens with uncommon meds for people too. But you usually don’t hear about it because there aren’t that many people that need it. There are so many more generics for people because there is so much more money put into medical research for humans. Animal medicine is mostly built off of the research done for human medicine. So since it has less research and funding, you end up with a lot of expensive name brand meds for animal specific issues.
Huh? Generics only exist once the original patent has expired. There’s no research necessary because it’s the exact same medication, just produced by a different company.