An easy way to enter the name of a specific drug or side effect to see its effects as reported to the FDA. One of the primary ways that the United States Food and Drug Administration monitors the safety of marketed drugs is the collection and analysis of reported adverse events (an event that was not the intended outcome of the prescribed drug and has a negative impact on health) through the FDA Adverse Events Reporting System (FAERS). These reports are submitted by physicians, healthcare consumers, lawyers amongst others, and then the FDA scientific staff will assess these events in the context of other databases to determine if a particular safety concern is associated, and possibly caused by, exposure to a particular drug. Since this is a public database and useful to prescribers and patients alike to know if "has what I'm experiencing been described in patients taking this drug before?" DrugCite has created a more friendly interface to answer that question. The data can also be sorted by Age and Gender in most cases giving a more detailed view.
Thats a very good point, also it's important to look for off label side effects (Adverse Events) to the non prescription drugs. I own the site linked to in the 'Uses' section (http://www.drugcite.com/?q=melatonin), it's also to sort the data by date and gender to get more accurate information. This data is put together from numerous data sets including FDA FAERS.
As for Melatonin Adverse Events, it's my site that's linked to under 'Uses', (http://www.drugcite.com/?q=melatonin) It's important to sort the data by age and gender as the AE's can vary greatly. That data is FDA FAERS data that runs against many other datasets by the way.
http://www.drugcite.com/
We use several data sets including FAERS, Meddra, Medical Device Data, UMLS/RXNORM and DAILYMED/Structured Product Labels to name a few.