The Medication You Already Know Doesn't Work

You've been on Gabapentin before. It was prescribed for nerve pain three years ago, you took it for four months, and you stopped because the cognitive blunting was worse than the pain. You don't remember the dose. You remember that it didn't work. Now a new neurologist — the fourth one who doesn't have access to the previous three's records — is recommending Gabapentin for the same nerve pain.

Without a medication history you control, that conversation is your memory against their clinical logic. With it, you can say: Gabapentin 300mg TID, started March 2021, stopped July 2021, Cons: significant word-finding difficulty, fatigue, no meaningful pain reduction at this dose.

The database makes you the expert on your own pharmaceutical history.

Pros and Cons: The Efficacy Layer No Prescription Record Captures

Discharge summaries and pharmacy records tell you what was prescribed. They do not tell you whether it worked. Pros is the benefit you actually experienced: "reduced nerve pain in left arm by approximately 70%," "slept through the night consistently for the first time in two years," "anxiety manageable enough to return to part-time work." Cons is the real cost: "severe nausea first three weeks," "weight gain of 8kg over six months," "completely sedated, unable to drive," "no noticeable effect at any dose tried."

The combination of Pros and Cons across a full medication history reveals your personal pharmacological response patterns. Some people tolerate SNRIs poorly and respond well to tricyclics. Some people find that low-dose naltrexone does more for their neuropathic pain than any gabapentinoid. None of that is knowable from the prescription record. It's knowable from honest outcome documentation over time.

The Five Conditions and the Comorbidity Map

Used For covers Depression, Anxiety, Nerve Pain, Inflammation, and Headache. For someone managing a complex chronic neurological condition, these five categories frequently overlap — the same drug might be prescribed for nerve pain and incidentally address depression, or prescribed for anxiety and worsen headache. A single medication entry can carry multiple Used For tags, which makes the cross-condition correlation visible in the data.

The pattern across twenty medications over five years tells you which conditions are being treated aggressively and which are undertreated. If there are twelve entries for nerve pain and none for anxiety, and the Cons column is full of references to anxiety symptoms causing adherence problems, that's information your next prescriber needs.

Started and Stopped: The Duration Signal

Started and Stopped dates calculate the trial duration. A medication that was stopped after three days failed immediately — adverse effect, intolerance, acute reaction. One stopped after four months suggests an adequate trial that produced insufficient benefit. One with a Started date and no Stopped date is current.

Duration correlates with reason for stopping. Gabapentin stopped at day 4 with Cons = "intolerable dizziness and vomiting" is a different entry from Gabapentin stopped at month 6 with Cons = "modest effect, decided to try alternative." Both matter. The former flags a medication you cannot tolerate at any dose. The latter opens the door to revisiting it at a different dose or in combination with something else.

Dose in free text captures the full prescription: "300mg TID," "75mg QD increasing to 150mg at week 2," "10mg/5ml oral solution, 5ml nocte." Free text because dose adjustments, titration schedules, and liquid formulations don't fit a simple number field.

The description says: "Never worry you'll take a bad med twice." That's exactly it.