Terms of use

What this is. A mirror of the U.S. FDA drug shortage database, reproduced under the openFDA license, with a daily comparison between copies. We add no availability information of our own.

No medical advice. Nothing here is a recommendation about your treatment. Do not change how you take a medication without speaking to your prescriber or pharmacist.

No guarantee. The data is national, lags reality, and may be incomplete. It cannot tell you what any pharmacy holds. We publish our known limitations on the methodology page rather than burying them in a disclaimer nobody reads.

Availability is a manufacturer’s claim, not ours. When a page says a manufacturer reports shipping a product, that is a report we are relaying with its date attached. We do not verify it, we cannot verify it, and we do not imply that it was true at the moment you read it.

Alerts do not exist yet, and when they do they will be best effort. The alerting system is still being built: requesting a watch today records your request and sends you nothing. When it ships, it will check the feed daily and send email through a third party, where a missed day, a delivery failure or a feed outage is always possible. Either way, never build a medication plan on the assumption that an email will arrive.

Substitutions are a clinical decision. Where a page notes that smaller strengths add up to a larger one, that is arithmetic, not a recommendation. Whether it is appropriate for you is for your prescriber and pharmacist to decide.

The data belongs to the FDA. The underlying dataset is public and is used under the openFDA license. Our contribution is the daily comparison and the presentation.

Changes to these terms. If they change materially we will say so on this page with a date rather than quietly editing the text.