Hi everyone,

Over the past many years medical education in India underwent multiple changes to bring in the uniformity and to make every Indian medical student a competent medical graduate. In order to fulfil this vision NMC has laid down extensive guidelines in the form of CBME curriculum introduced from 2019 onwards. Among all the medical subjects, pharmacology has an important place in the medical curriculum. It connects the knowledge acquired from pre- and para-clinical subjects with that of clinical subjects. Good understanding of pharmacology subject helps in making rational clinical management decisions in patients.

We have a huge number of pharmacology textbooks available in the market for medical students. But my question is “WHICH OF THE PHARMACOLOGY TEXTBOOKS WRITTEN BASED ON CBME CURRICULUM GIVE INFORMATION ABOUT THE DRUGS APPROVED BY INDIAN FDA ONLY WITH THEIR ACTUAL APPLICATIONS IN CLINICAL PRACTICE ?”. Almost all the pharmacology textbooks include drugs approved for a particular disease without mentioning their approval status for each drug (whether approved by Indian FDA or not) and their actual applications in clinical practice. Lack of this information makes a medical graduate confused and not confident enough while taking rational decisions in disease management. Many drugs approved by US FDA are not approved by Indian FDA (for example, many of the monoclonal antibodies for cancer) either due to high cost or due to the availability of better alternatives. And for those drugs received approval from Indian FDA, the time period is usually longer (sometimes 2-3 years after the US FDA approval) – for example, bempedoic acid for the management of hypercholesterolemia was approved by US FDA in 2020, but received approval from Indian FDA in 2022 only.

Hence this pharmacology module has been prepared to give information about the drugs approved by Indian FDA only. Drugs under each chapter were classified based on their receptor selectivity and disease pathogenesis for better understanding. Drugs that were banned by the Indian FDA are not included in the drug classifications. Frequently used drugs in clinical practice were discussed in detail.

I hope that the content provided here will help MBBS students in India to prepare for university as well as competitive examinations such as NEETPG / FMGE / INI-CET / CMS etc in a better way and also for the medical doctors involved in patient care to be confident enough in making informed decisions. 

All the best.

Dr. D Rajesh MBBS, MD (Pharmacology)

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