Med reports · PetScored desk
What has been reported on your dog’s med.
If you are here at eleven at night because you just gave your dog something and then read a frightening forum thread, start with this: the FDA keeps a public record of what owners and vets report, and it is far less dramatic and far more useful than the thread. We put that record into plain English.
A report is not a rate. These are reports people filed with the FDA, not verified findings. Anyone can file one. And a count goes up with how many dogs take a med, not just how often something goes wrong, so a product given to millions will always show more reports than a rare one.
Nothing on this page can tell you how likely a side effect is for your dog. Nobody can calculate that from this data, because it records the reports and not the number of dogs treated. Use it to see what has been reported and what to keep an eye on, then talk to your vet.
Start here
The reports we have read
Two pages so far. We would rather publish two we can stand behind than sixteen we cannot.
- The isoxazoline flea and tick meds, as a group. Bravecto, NexGard, Simparica, Credelio and their siblings share a drug family and an FDA advisory. What that advisory actually says is not what most pages claim it says.
- Bravecto chewable tablets for dogs. 58,848 reports through 23 March 2026, what was reported, and how much of it can honestly be pinned on this product.
Why not scores
We refuse to score medications
Everything else on PetScored gets a number because we can defend the number. A bag of food has a label, an ingredient list, a guaranteed analysis and a price, all public, all checkable, all fed through the same published rubric. You can audit us.
A prescription medication has none of that in a form we could score. There is no public dataset that would let anyone rank one flea med against another for safety, and a number that looked like one would be a guess wearing a lab coat. So we do not publish one. This is the same call we make on the foods we refuse to score, applied to a whole category rather than a single bag.
What we can do is read the public FDA record carefully and tell you what is in it. That is what these pages are.
How to read it
The missing number, and why it matters
Here is the thing almost every article about this data gets wrong, including the ones with lawyers’ phone numbers at the bottom.
To know how risky something is, you need two numbers: how many dogs had a problem, and how many dogs took it. The FDA record gives you the first. It has never contained the second. No denominator, as a statistician would put it, which is a fancy way of saying you have the top of the fraction and not the bottom.
So a med given to eight million dogs will pile up more reports than one given to eighty thousand, even if the popular one is gentler per dose. Sorting meds by report count mostly sorts them by market share. That is why you will never find a ranking, a league table, or a “most dangerous” list here. We could build one in an afternoon. It would be worthless and it would scare people for no reason.
- What a report is
- Someone, usually an owner or a vet, told the FDA that something happened after a dog was given a product. That is the whole bar.
- What a report is not
- Proof the product caused it. Nobody at the FDA investigated most of these, and the record does not claim they did.
- Why one report can name several drugs
- A dog on a joint supplement and a painkiller and a flea med gets one report listing all three. The record does not say which one the vomiting belongs to. It never does. So each of our pages tells you how often the product was the only thing listed.
- Why “it didn’t work” shows up here
- Treatment failure counts as a reportable event, so “the fleas came back” sits in the same dataset as a seizure. We split those apart on every page, because a med not working and a med causing harm are different worries and lumping them together helps nobody.
Our limits
What we will never claim
- We will never say what percentage of dogs react to something. The data cannot support it and neither can we.
- We will never rank medications against each other by report count, or build a table that invites you to.
- We will never tell you to switch, stop, or change a dose. A med your vet chose was chosen for reasons this page cannot see.
- We will never describe an FDA advisory as more alarming than the FDA does. Where one exists we quote it and link it, and you can go read the original.
Read our medical disclaimer for the formal version. The short version is that these pages are here to make you better informed for a conversation with your vet, not to replace one.
If something happened
How to report it yourself
Call your vet first. After that, if you think a product caused a problem, you can add your own report to the record this page is built from. You can go through the company that makes it, which is legally required to pass it to the FDA, or you can go direct through the FDA’s own reporting page.
Reports from owners are not a lesser form of evidence here. On the Bravecto record, owners filed more of them than vets did.