Talk:Bacitracin/polymyxin B

Merge with Neosporin
Definately not. They are different products. The Polysporin sold in Canada has different ingredients (and is much less effective. i.e. has significantly less active antibiotics / ingredients) then the Neosporin sold in the USA. It would be beneficial to the community to be able to research each of them as the different products (and brand names) that they are. I had to ask a pharmacist what the difference was. I noticed no significant benefit using Polysporin where as Neosporin provided significant improvement. It would be similar to suggesting we should combine a page on Coca Cola with a page on Pepsi... The difference being at least Coca Cola and Pepsi are both cola's... I''m not even sure what Polysporin should be classed as...mperhaps soothing ointment,.. It has so little active ingredients (antibiotics) that it shouldn't be classed as an antibiotic ointment. I guess this is because health canada has banned the over the counter sale of Neosporin (read antibiotic ointments).. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Flyingfishsoup (talk • contribs) 20:33, 10 May 2014 (UTC)

I vote for merging. Karuna8 (talk) 03:18, 10 October 2013 (UTC)

Please do not merge. Many people have negative reactions to Neosporin, which contains Neomycin in combination with Bacitracin. Neomycin is NOT included in Polysporin which is the plus for Polysporin. Dogs should never have Neomycin, thus Polysporin is safe for them. Plastic surgeons have often recommended heavy use of Polysporin to decrease scaring in addition to infection prevention. Multi-antibiotic ointments are not all the same when they contain different antibiotics. 64.132.81.162 (talk) 01:32, 20 June 2014 (UTC)

Hi, health care workers like Mois (this IS a Canadian product and so we must include Francais), use wikipedia to find out what is in it when the patient comes to our clinic and says I got sick or got a rash from ______. Can keep as separate pages? When in Canada i thought it was Neosporin until now when I read wiki. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.116.206.254 (talk) 08:32, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

Merge under new name. Should be Antibiotic ointments, with the entire article devoted to the difference between the ointments and great deference paid to the fact that these products come under different brands with exactly the same ingredients. A trade name should not be used for a generic product. BeenAroundAWhile (talk) 17:26, 13 April 2015 (UTC)
 * merge with new name  I concur with the reasoning of BeenAroundAWhile, the issue is about the antibiotic action, not what name it is marketed under--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 18:07, 13 April 2015 (UTC)


 * Merging to antibiotic ointment seems reasonable or at least to the generic name. Doc James  (talk · contribs · email) 19:58, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

This might seem complicated, but here's what I'd like, based on these unfortunate facts:
 * After consulting a popular pharmacology source, namely Walmart.com, I have determined that "Polysporin", i.e., the OTC drug produced by Pfizer with this registered trademark name in the US, should contain Bacitracin and Polymyxin and nothing else.
 * However, Health Canada says that (at least) two different drugs are called "Polysporin". If that's not an error, then we have a bit of a problem.

So I propose:
 * 1) Rename Neosporin to Triple antibiotic ointment (currently redirects here) so that the article is correctly located at the generic name.
 * 2) Move this page to Antibiotic ointment, with Main summaries of articles such as Triple antibiotic ointment, plus room for any others.
 * 3) * If you write new content, send the new page to WP:DYK. Please.
 * 4) * Include a section about the registered trademark, "Polysporin", and have Polysporin redirect there. It should be easy to find a source that says it's stupid and dangerous to have the same brand name represent different drugs.
 * 5) * Figure out the generic names for each of the six (or more?) different drugs currently listed in this article. Turn each drug into a list item or section of its own, so that readers will quickly see that ointments containing different chemicals are not the same thing, no matter what label some marketing professional put on the box.
 * 6) * If we have more than a paragraph about any of these drugs, then create and link new, separate articles, ideally with a drugbox.

I realize that this is a bit of work, but I think it would produce the clearest end result. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:01, 14 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Yes good idea Doc James  (talk · contribs · email) 08:35, 14 April 2015 (UTC)