Wyn Drabble: Drug names can be real tonic

Wyn Drabble.

Pharmaceutical nomenclature can both bewilder and bemuse. When I first came home with Efudix a couple of years ago, Mrs D had a jolly good laugh. Efudix! Whatever were they thinking?

Then last week I came home with a small tube of Fucicort to "apply sparingly to the affected area". Fucicort! Whatever were they thinking?

Then, the very next day, I happened upon another new pharmaceutical product while I was browsing online. This unguent claims to offer "rapid relief from chickenpox" and to gain your confidence they have decided to call it PoxClin! Do you apply PoxClin sparingly to your pox?

Perhaps they would have been better to concentrate on the poultry part of the affliction's name rather than the pox part. ChickEez, perhaps? On second thoughts, that could easily be mistaken for some sort of yellow snack food - pass the ChickEez please.

As you can imagine, this set me to researching what was behind such horrible - even offensive - names. Aided only by the internet, a cold beer and a bowl of ChickEez, I set to work.

Obviously, a major requirement is to sound pharmaceutically scientific. I suppose the examples above tick that box. But there is a serious reason for care being taken. It seems some wrong medicines have been prescribed because the names sounded so familiar so names now have to pass stringent tests.

Celebrex (for arthritis) was being confused with Celexa (an anti-depressant), Foradil (for bronchitis) was being confused with Toradol (pain relief for arthritis sufferers).

One "fix" was to make manufacturers use capital letters for the significant parts of names so Clomiphene became ClomiPHENE and Clomipramine became ClomiPRAMINE. (Please note I do not know what ailment any of these is meant to cure.)

But clearly this is far from a perfect fix and it certainly doesn't alter the fact that the names sound silly and clunky. The FDA (Food and Drug Administration) in the US is the main watchdog and apparently rejects about four of every 10 proposed names.

This means that it can take a year or two for a pharmaceutical company to get through the creative process, the trademark process and then the FDA approval process. Yet still they come up with Efudix, Fucicort and PoxClin.

But I have my own theories.

To me, the most important criterion is that the name should not roll pleasingly from the tongue. Consider Celecoxib, Linezolid and Metaxalone. Or Incivek, Adcetris, Viibryd or Xgeva.

The second is that it should sound really geeky. Like Yervoy.

Third, it should be difficult to spell so when doctors scrawl a prescription embarrassing errors are undetectable.

I realise this content has been pretty heavy going so, to finish off, I prescribe a jolly good laugh.

What better source than my old favourite, Engrish. These (real) Asian examples of bathroom products did not have to pass rigorous FDA checks.

A skin softener: Penetrates pores deeply to quickly dissolve accumulated oil and dirty old horny to promote normal metabolism of skin keratin and recuperation of skin.

Ling Long Bath Sponge: Add some shower juice is it make foam to be abundant all over to wipe to wipeaway, smooth and incomp-arable before taking a shower, is it carry on keep - fit massage to who-le body, let skin gloss extraordina-rily of you happily easily toequal to, fine and smooth and rich filexibly, like bud being generally pleasant.

You've got to admit that the name rolls pleasingly from the tongue. Go on, say it. Ling Long. Now compare that with Fucicort. Or PoxClin.

- Wyn Drabble is a teacher of English, a writer, musician and public speaker.