Evaluating Patients' Perspective on Metoclopramide with Text Mining

Pharmacovigilance attempts to detect, assess, understand, and prevent adverse effects or any other possible drug-related problems. All pharmacovigilance systems in existence today rely on voluntary reporting. The effectiveness of these systems are limited due to under reporting and reporting bias. A vast amount of patient generated data on possible adverse effects can be found on health related web forums and social media. It is possible to use these user generated data to augment traditional pharmacovigilance systems. The purpose of this study is to examine the usefulness of such data found on health related web forums by evaluating patients’ perspective on metoclopramide. Data was obtained from two popular health related forums Drugs.com and WebMD.com. Web scraping was used to obtain the necessary data in tabulated form.