Health care workers are changing how they counsel patients. Experts are using our database to support their research. And some consumers report they’ve discovered troubling records at the factories where their medications are made.

The calls came over the span of a single month in 2004, patient after patient with strikingly similar complaints. Some told Oregon psychiatrist James Hancey that their new generic medication for depression had stopped working. Others described unexpected reactions — dizziness, flu-like symptoms and electric shock sensations in the brain.

“That started to tell me, ‘This drug is no good,’” Hancey said. “You get all these phone calls where people are saying the exact same thing.”

Hancey suspected that the generic was ineffective, and that his patients were suffering from abrupt withdrawal. But he had no easy way to confirm exactly where the pills came from or the safety record of the factory that made them. He began keeping what he called a “no fly” list — dozens of generic drugs he suspected were unsafe or ineffective — based largely on patterns he observed in his patients.

Now, he has something else.

Last month, ProPublica launched Rx Inspector, a free, searchable tool that allows doctors, researchers and patients to trace a specific generic medication back to its manufacturer and to see the inspection history of the factory.