Learn how we calculate risk scores, identify potential side effects, and how to get the most out of DoseDeck
Take the Interactive TutorialDoseDeck is a harm reduction and educational platform designed to help you understand how substances interact with each other. We analyze combinations of medications, supplements, and substances to provide easy-to-understand risk assessments - helping you make safer, more informed decisions.
Follow these simple steps to check your substances for potential interactions:
Go to the Deck Builder and start typing the name of any medication, supplement, or substance. Our search includes:
Tip: You can search by brand name (Tylenol) or generic name (Acetaminophen) - we'll find it either way!
Add all the substances you want to check. Your "deck" is your personal combination - add everything you're currently taking or considering taking together.
Once you have 2+ substances in your deck, we automatically analyze them and show you:
Have questions about your results? AI Jay is your personal substance safety assistant. Click the purple chat icon to:
Pro Tip: Set up your health profile (age, conditions, allergies) for more personalized guidance from AI Jay!
Create a free account to save your decks and access them from any device:
Your risk score (0-100) represents the overall safety concern for your combination. Here's what each level means:
No clinically significant interaction expected at standard doses. Safe to use together as directed.
Generally safe. Be aware of potential minor effects, but no special action usually required at standard doses.
Monitor for side effects. Report unusual symptoms to your healthcare provider. Timing or dosing awareness may be useful.
Use with caution. Regular monitoring of relevant labs and symptoms recommended. Worth discussing with a pharmacist or doctor before combining.
Avoid this combination. If medically necessary, requires specialist monitoring and potential dose adjustment.
Do not use together. Seek immediate alternative. If already taking, contact prescriber urgently.
Our risk scoring system analyzes multiple factors from trusted medical sources to give you a comprehensive safety assessment:
We check if substances directly interact with each other - like when one drug affects how your body processes another, or when they compete for the same receptors.
When multiple substances have similar effects (like both causing drowsiness or both raising heart rate), those effects can stack and become more intense.
Not all interactions are equally serious. We weight interactions based on their documented clinical significance - from minor inconveniences to life-threatening reactions.
We detect dangerous syndromes like serotonin syndrome (MAOIs + SSRIs, including linezolid), QT prolongation with electrolyte depletion, CNS depression stacking, and efficacy loss from enzyme inducers.
We assess which body systems are affected - liver, kidneys, heart, brain - and flag when multiple substances stress the same organs.
How quickly interactions occur matters. Some happen immediately, others build over time. We factor in onset timing and how long effects last.
DoseDeck cross-references a dozen authoritative sources for every analysis. Each source fills a specific gap so that — together — we can cover prescription drugs, OTC products, supplements, herbs, alcohol, and even substances that traditional checkers ignore.
Full license & attribution details for every source are on our Legal page.
Note: While we strive for accuracy, no database can capture every possible interaction. Always consult healthcare professionals for important medical decisions.
DoseDeck looks for well-documented life-threatening clinical syndromes, including:
Validated against comprehensive clinical test suites covering known dangerous combinations.
Traditional interaction checkers usually draw from one database. DoseDeck is different: we combine a dozen complementary sources so that very few substances fall through the cracks. Here is what each part of our source mix adds to overall coverage.
openFDA Drug Labels, DailyMed, and RxNorm cover every FDA-approved prescription and OTC product sold in the United States — including the official interaction, warning, and contraindication language from the prescribing information.
openFDA FAERS adds millions of post-marketing adverse event reports, so we can spot interactions that surfaced after drugs reached the market — not only the ones on the original label.
PubMed / NCBI gives us access to 30+ million indexed studies. When a drug pair has documented interaction research — even if it isn't listed in the label — our checker picks it up.
NIH Office of Dietary Supplements fact sheets cover vitamins, minerals, and botanicals that traditional drug databases often ignore. This is how we catch interactions like St. John's Wort weakening birth control, or magnesium binding to antibiotics.
DDInter 2.0 contributes a curated corpus of over 134,000 clinically annotated drug-drug interactions — including severity grades and mechanism summaries that help us weight each finding correctly.
The TripSit harm-reduction matrix fills an important gap: substances that aren't in FDA databases at all — alcohol combined with recreational substances, research chemicals, psychedelics, kratom, nitrous oxide, and more. This is what lets DoseDeck support real harm reduction, not just prescription medicine.
The FDA CYP450 Substrate / Inhibitor / Inducer table — together with peer-reviewed pharmacology references — tells us when two drugs will compete for the same liver enzymes, long before anyone has published a direct interaction study on the pair.
FDA- and ISPE-recognized Narrow Therapeutic Index (NTI) drugs — warfarin, digoxin, lithium, levothyroxine, phenytoin, tacrolimus, and others — get extra caution because small changes in their levels can cause real harm.
By layering these sources together — authoritative labels, real-world reports, peer-reviewed research, supplement science, an open-access interaction corpus, harm-reduction data, and enzyme-level pharmacology — DoseDeck can evaluate combinations across prescription drugs, OTC products, supplements, herbs, alcohol, and recreational substances in a single unified risk score. Very few mainstream checkers cover this full breadth, and that is by design: our mission is harm reduction for anyone, not only patients on prescribed medication.
When you view your deck results, we show you side effects to watch for. Here's how we identify them:
Each substance has its own common side effects. We list these from FDA-approved labeling and clinical studies.
When multiple substances share the same side effect (like drowsiness), we highlight these as they're likely to be more pronounced.
Some effects only occur when specific substances are combined. These unique interaction effects are flagged separately.
We organize side effects by how serious they are, so you know which ones need immediate attention vs. which are just annoying.
AI Jay is your personal substance safety assistant, available to DoseDeck+ subscribers. Ask questions in plain English and get clear, helpful answers about your specific combination.
Important: AI Jay provides educational information, not medical advice. While it's trained to be helpful and accurate, AI can make mistakes. Always verify important information with healthcare professionals.
For important legal disclaimers, terms of service, privacy information, and data source attributions, please visit our Legal page.
View Legal InformationStart building your deck and get instant risk analysis for your combination.