Forensic pharmacovigilance: Newer dimension of pharmacovigilance

• Forensic Sciences and pharmacovigilance constitute important disciplines of medical sciences.
• Forensic pharmacovigilance offers a wide scope of implementing the pharmacovigilance skills for forensic purposes.
• Scope of this newer collaboration ranges from discrimination between ADR and AE to chapping the mysterious forensic cases.
• Hurdles e.g. reluctance of medical professionals, cannot be denied. They do exist in the forensic pharmacovigilance.
• Wise and cautious application of facts are the keys to establish a successful forensic pharmacovigilance.

Drug safety for the patients is of paramount importance for a medical professional. Pharmacovigilance attempts to ensure the safety of patients by keeping a close vigil on the pattern of adverse events secondary to drug use. Number of medicolegal cases is at rise since last few years. Forensic sciences and pharmacovigilance need to work hand in hand to unlock the mystery of many criminal and civil proceedings. Pharmacovigilance offers its wide scope in forensic sciences by putting forward its expertise on adverse profile of drugs which may be instrumental in solving the cases and bringing the justice forth. It may range from as simple affairs as defining the adverse drug reaction on one hand to putting expert advice in critical criminal cases on the other one. Pharmacovigilance experts have to abide by the ethics of the practice while executing their duties as expert else it may tarnish the justice and loosen its dependability. As a budding discipline of science, it is confronted with several hurdles and challenges which include reluctance of medical professionals for being involved in court proceedings, extrapolations of facts and data and variations in law across the globe etc. These challenges and hurdles call the medical fraternity come forward to work towards the momentous application of pharmacovigilance in the forensic sciences. Evidence based practice e.g. testing the biological samples for the presence of drugs may prove to be pivotal in the success of this collaboration of sciences.