Every entry comes from a national health agency or a published medical vocabulary, and names its source inside the app. Nothing is scraped from the open web, and no clinical text is generated by AI.
| Source | What it provides | Licence |
|---|---|---|
| openFDA U.S. Food & Drug Administration |
Official medicine labels: what a medicine treats, its warnings, contraindications and interactions. Brand and generic names. | Public domain (CC0) |
| MedlinePlus U.S. National Library of Medicine |
Plain-language explanations of conditions and symptoms, written for patients rather than clinicians. | U.S. Government work |
| CDC Centers for Disease Control |
Travel health guidance: vaccines, malaria risk and precautions by destination. | Public domain |
| Human Phenotype Ontology | A standard vocabulary of symptoms, so the app understands "throwing up" and "vomiting" as the same thing. | CC BY 4.0 |
WHO publishes excellent guidance, but most of it is licensed in a way that does not permit rebuilding it into an app database, or does not permit commercial use. Rather than stretch those terms, MedSearch is built on sources that explicitly allow this use. WHO's international generic drug names, which are placed in the public domain, are the exception and we do use those.
The FDA publishes millions of adverse-event reports. We do not show them. Without knowing how many people took a medicine, a raw count of reports misleads far more than it informs.
Medicine labels are written by the manufacturer and filed with the FDA. They can be out of date, and they describe medicines as sold in the United States — brand names, doses and availability differ elsewhere.
Being listed in MedSearch is not an endorsement by any agency, and MedSearch is not affiliated with, connected to, or endorsed by the FDA, the National Library of Medicine, the CDC, or any government body.