In this application, drugs are considered substances that are administered by prescription and, if used inappropriately or cause an adverse reaction, can be toxic. These are also known as pharmaceuticals, medicines, therapeutics, etc. Unless known to be inert, all other substances that are ingested, injected, or topically applied are potentially toxic.

We are not interested in the therapeutic use of these substances because it is part of the practice of medicine, which requires the use of medical arts as well as sciences. Herein, these substances are only of interest in how they cause diseases or conditions that are primary diagnoses or how they may alter or mask the presentation of a condition that is the primary diagnosis.

The names of drugs and other potentially toxic substances are often made up of multiple, sometimes very complicated, words. When looking up a substance, some of the leading terms may be easier to remember or look up. In this index, the names are permuted, or rotated, circularly so that each important word can be the leading term in the lookup. These permuted terms are then presented alphabetically to facilitate a manual search.

At this time, we have not included brand names. However, common foreign terminology is included because travelers may have access to or be exposed to substances known by other names. Also slang names for substances are indicated by single quote marks.

Sometimes the names have special characters. If it makes sense, these will be permuted as well. However, the ones that do not make sense when listed first may be missed. These need to be fixed manually and should be removed in the next version.

The classification of drugs and other substances is multidimensional. They can be categorized by chemical structure, specific chemical elements or substructures, therapeutic use, route of administration, pharmacological action, etc. As much as possible all of these have been included in the index without further subclassification. Because there are so many different classes, they have been permuted and the permutations are listed alphabetically.

The Argo diagnostic software was developed to use drugs and other toxic substances to diagnose adverse reactions or to unmask a primary diagnosis that may present differently when the patient has used the substance. The correct treatment depends on making the correct diagnosis.