Struggling to find equivalent medications abroad? (especially in Korea)
Posted by PretendMight2085@reddit | expats | View on Reddit | 8 comments
I’ve noticed this comes up quite a lot when living abroad:
Trying to find an equivalent for a medication you used back home.
Sometimes you only have the brand name or a photo, and it’s not always easy to figure out what the local alternative is, especially when the names and systems are completely different.
I ran into this problem often enough that I started looking into ways to make this easier.
I’m not sure if this actually helps yet, but I’d really appreciate your thoughts if anyone’s curious.
Happy to share if anyone’s interested.
Also curious how others deal with this, or if there are better ways I might be missing.
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Vladimir_Putting@reddit
If you have the brand name or photo it should be pretty trivial to find the active ingredient or chemical name of the drug. Then you find a pharmacist who can guide you.
You could also use websites like this one that catalog international drug names: https://www.drugs.com/international/
hodgsonstreet@reddit
Agreed. Lived in 5 countries with a chronic illness and have always been able to get the information I need very easily via Google.
OP is trying to conduct market research.
PretendMight2085@reddit (OP)
Yeah, that’s usually the approach I end up taking too.
It works, but I’ve noticed it can still be a bit tricky in practice — especially when people don’t know the exact active ingredient or when naming conventions differ a lot between countries.
That’s kind of what made me start thinking about whether there could be an easier way to check this.
hodgsonstreet@reddit
Why does it feel like you’re about to tell us you built an app
PretendMight2085@reddit (OP)
Haha I can see why it sounds like that
Honestly I haven’t built anything serious , just kept running into the problem enough times that it got me thinking about it.
badlydrawngalgo@reddit
A bit far away from Korea but in Portugal you have Infarmed. It's the publicly accessible government database of all the drugs and devices available in Portugal and the prices in both the public and private health systems. You can search by medication name or active ingredient.
https://www.infarmed.pt/web/infarmed/precos-de-medicamentos
PretendMight2085@reddit (OP)
That’s really interesting — having a centralized database like that must make things much easier.
I guess that’s part of the challenge though, since every country seems to handle this differently.
It’s not always easy to know where to look depending on where you are.