Finding your usual medicine in Korea by its ingredient

Ask for the ingredient, not the brand

The box in your bathroom cabinet carries a brand chosen for your home market. A Korean pharmacy stocks products licensed in Korea, often under names you have never seen, and a pharmacist cannot match a foreign brand they do not carry. What travels is the active ingredient: the substance that does the work, printed on every pack in small type under a heading such as ‘active ingredient’ or ‘contains’.

A few brands are the same on both sides. Tylenol, for example, is sold in Korea under that name, and several Tylenol products are on the official list of medicines convenience stores may sell. Most are not, so the ingredient is the reliable route.

Read your own pack first

1. Find the active ingredient on the box or leaflet, not the brand on the front
2. Note every ingredient if there is more than one. Cold and flu products may combine several
3. Note the strength of each, written in mg, so the pharmacist can compare like with like
4. Take a photo of the panel. It is quicker to show than to spell

Watch for two names for one substance. One painkiller goes by paracetamol in some countries and acetaminophen in others; the U.S. National Library of Medicine lists paracetamol and APAP among acetaminophen’s other names. Korea uses acetaminophen, written 아세트아미노펜.

How Korean product records name ingredients

Korea’s medicines regulator, the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety, publishes product records on nedrug (의약품안전나라). Each record gives the main ingredients in Korean (주성분) with their English names (주성분영문명) and shows whether the product is prescription-only (전문의약품) or sold over the counter (일반의약품). Salt forms are part of the name, so the Korean on a box can be longer than the word you know.

Seeing a name in this table says nothing about whether a particular Korean product is over the counter. That depends on the product and its strength, and the record states it for each one.

Looking it up yourself on nedrug

The search page is in Korean but the results are easy to read once you know where to look. Search by ingredient name using the Korean name, which you can copy from the table above or from our glossary. Each result lists the product name, the company, the main ingredients in both scripts and the classification. Some records also link to a summary page called e약은요.

This is useful before you go: you can arrive with the Korean ingredient name, and if you photograph a product you were given, you can check what is in it. It is not a substitute for asking. A record tells you what a product contains, not whether it suits you.

Combination products and doubling up

Korean cold remedies, like those at home, can pack several ingredients into one tablet. One record on nedrug, for instance, combines pseudoephedrine, acetaminophen, phenylephrine and chlorpheniramine. If you are already taking a painkiller, a cold remedy can quietly give you a second dose of the same thing.

One acetaminophen product at a time. The U.S. National Library of Medicine warns against taking more than one product that contains acetaminophen at a time, and advises reading every label, prescription and non-prescription, for it. Show the pharmacist everything you are already taking, including what you brought from home.

At the counter

• Show the ingredient in Korean and English, and its strength
• Say what it is for and whether you have taken it before
• Mention allergies, pregnancy, other medicines and any long-term condition
• Let the pharmacist choose the product. They know what is on the shelf and what fits

If the ingredient you want is prescription-only in Korea, the pharmacist cannot sell it without a prescription from a doctor or dentist, however ordinary it is at home. That is set by the Pharmaceutical Affairs Act, not left to the pharmacist’s discretion; our prescription guide covers how a visitor gets one.

Glossary: common medicines in Korean

Prescription or over the counter?

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