How to read a medicine box

1. The brand name

The large name is the brand — the name the company sells it under. It is not the medicine. Panadol, Calpol and Febrol are different brands that all contain paracetamol, made by different companies, at different prices.

This is the single most common source of confusion, and the reason a directory needs both views: search Panadol to see what that brand covers, or paracetamol to see every brand of the ingredient.

2. The strength

The number with a unit — 500 mg, 250 mg/5 ml, 0.25 mg — is how much active ingredient each unit contains. mg is milligrams, mlmillilitres, mcg micrograms (a thousandth of a milligram), IUinternational units.

Two packs with the same brand name can carry very different strengths. In the register, Serenace appears as 0.25 mg, 1.5 mg and 5 mg — three separate registrations, three separate products. A slash means per volume: 250 mg/5 ml is 250 mg in every 5 ml of liquid, not 250 mg per bottle.

3. The dosage form

The word after the strength says what the product physically is: tablet, capsule, syrup, suspension, injection, cream, drops, inhaler. It matters because the same ingredient behaves differently in different forms, and because some forms are not interchangeable — a syrup and a tablet of the same strength are not the same thing to measure.

4. The registration number

A number in the form 101138 or 000022-EX is the product's registration number from the Drug Regulatory Authority of Pakistan. It is usually printed small, often near the batch number or the manufacturer's details, and it is the single most useful thing on the pack: it identifies one specific product from one specific company, and nothing else shares it.

Registration numbers are issued in sequence and padded to six digits, so an older product looks like 000005 and a newer one like 101138. A suffix such as -EX marks an exempt or specially categorised entry; a trailing letter marks a variation on an existing registration.

Type it into the search box on this site and you get the register's own record for that number — the registered name, who holds it, and the approved price where one is published. This works even when the brand name on the box is unfamiliar or misspelled, which is why it is the better search.

5. The pack size

10's, 100's, 1's is the count in the pack — ten tablets, a hundred tablets, one vial. The same registration is often approved in several pack sizes, each with its own price. In the register, one Serenace injection registration carries both a 6's pack and a 25's pack, priced separately, because they are different quantities of the same product.

This is why a price quoted for “the same medicine” can differ between two shops without either being wrong: check the pack size before comparing.

6. The manufacturer and marketing holder

Two different companies can be involved. The manufacturer makes the product; the marketing authorisation holder is the company whose name the registration is in, and who is responsible for it. They are often the same, and sometimes not — a product made under contract for another company will name both.

Browse all manufacturers to see what any one company is registered to make.

What the box does not tell you

• Whether the pack is genuine. A correct registration number on a box is not proof the box is real — a counterfeit can copy it. It is evidence the product should exist, not that this particular pack does.
• Whether it suits you. Nothing about a registration, a strength or an approved price is medical advice. Whether a medicine is right for a person depends on things no register holds.
• How to take it. Dose, timing and duration come from the prescriber or the pharmacist, not from the pack alone and certainly not from this site.
• What a shop should charge you. The register lists an approved price for products that have one. What a particular pharmacy charges is a different question.

Why this page exists

The DRAP register holds all of this information already — 138,725 registrations, free and public — but it presents it as a search box with no explanation. Nothing on the government site tells a reader what a registration number is or where to find it on a pack. That is a gap in explanation, not in data, and it is cheap to close.

The examples above are real registrations from the bundled register snapshot, chosen because they illustrate a point. Strength and dosage form are read from the registered name, so a product whose name omits them will not show them here either.