As I have spent most of my working life working for a big pharma company, that has skewed my view a little but choose on case by case basis here. In UK where generally a set prescription price for generic or brand, would always go for brand in support of pharma co as seeing the years of work that go into discovering drug in first place made me think twice about generic
(not biting hand that feeds and all that). Here in OZ don't have the money to always go brand, I try to go Australian made if possible. Luckily have not needed many medicines, if I needed something fairly specialised then would research and then decide. Two people can have same ingredients and follow identical instructions and get differing results - same is true with drugs and often they don't have the exact same instructions IYKWIM.