These expenses visits to medical professionals as well as any medicine or drug which requires a prescription of a physician for legal use.

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Farmeron is a Web data service that farmers can use to aggregate the troves of information produced about their animals: diet, health, reproduction, milk production and medicine or drug dosage.

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In the most restrictive cases, only certain registered doctors are allowed to prescribe a medicine, or a drug is only distributed by a limited number of pharmacies.

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For any drug, be it a new medicine to treat diabetes in millions of patients, or a drug to treat a rare disease afflicting only a few thousand people around the world, intense discussions and analyses are carried out to determine how best to price such a drug.

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According to briefing documents available on the FDA's Web site, sound-alike and look-alike names are a common cause of medicine errors--when patients receive the wrong drug or the wrong dose.

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Arena's drug, lorcaserin, was born out of one of the drug industry's greatest disasters: Redux, or fenfluramine, a Wyeth medicine that was yanked from the market after it was found to cause heart valve damage.

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So when you see the press in full cry over some drug the question to ask is this: Is this medicine a genuine threat, or has it simply lost its star billing?

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What really struck home is how much patients value this medicine, never mind the controversy over black-market abuse by bodybuilders, drug abusers, or rapists who use a similar chemical to knock out their victims.

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