Reporting to Medication Companies

Medication companies rely on reporting of adverse events (side effects, medication acting oddly, etc) or quality concerns (bubbles in your pill, packaging problems). If you're having an issue, reporting it will both lead to better medication and hopefully a way to address your problem.

What You Need

- the medication manufacturer name (usually on the bottle or the *insert* that comes with your medication)

- the name of the medication (both brand name [i.e. Tylenol] and the generic pharmaceutical name [i.e. Acetaminophen])

If you aren't sure what the generic name is, it's usually on the box somewhere lower:

On this box, the Brand name is “TYLENOL® Extra Strength Cold & Flu Multi-Action Day/Daytime”. The pharmaceutical name is “Acetaminophen, Dexromethorphan HBr, Pseudoephedrine HCl”.

- the name of the patient (if it's not you)

- a way to contact the patient (if it's not you)

- details about the issue (if it's a side effect, details of that, photos if possible. If it's the medication acting oddly, you need to know what it's doing and what it isn't doing to the patient. And if it's a quality concern, photos are best).

- if you can get the lot/batch number of the medication, that helps

- if you remember where/when you bought the medication, that helps

What to Do

Google the name of the medication maker. In this case, the Tylenol website pops up. At the bottom of the site I can see “Contact us”. I click on that and there's a section:

Call Us
For an immediate response or to report an adverse event or a side effect from our products, please call us at
1-877-TYLENOL
Monday - Friday 9:00AM - 5:30PM ET.

But I'm phone-shy. So I'm going to instead look at the very bottom, where it says:

© Johnson & Johnson Consumer Inc. 2023. All rights reserved. This site is published by Johnson & Johnson Consumer Inc., which is solely responsible for its contents. This website is intended for visitors from the United States. The third-party trademarks used herein are trademarks of their respective owners.

Okay, so Tylenol is owned by Johnson and Johnson. Johnson and Johnson is on my List of Contacts for Medication Adverse Events/Product Defects. They're a part of Kenvue.

I click on the Kenvue link. There's a “For Consumers” section, so I'm going to click on the “What can we help you with?” button there.
There's a “Concern or Complaint” option on the form. I'm going to choose that and enter my information and add any photos. This can be bullet points. It does not have to be fancy.
Hit submit.

That's it! The hardest part is finding your manufacturer name and the correct form. In general, if you use the regular contact form, they'll still take it. It's just faster to get a response if you use the form.

Contact for Medication Adverse Events/Product Defects

These links are based out of the US, because that's where I am. In order to find your country's version, I suggest searching for the company name, 'adverse event', and your country name on the internet.

- Abbvie

- Amgen

- AstraZeneca

- Bayer

- Boehringer-Ingelheim

- Bristol Myers Squibb

- Eli Lilly

- Gilead

- GSK (for Side Effect)

- GSK (for Adverse Event)

- Johnson and Johnson Innovative Medicine/Janssen

- Johnson and Johnson Medical Technology