Nowadays we here that people are more relying on compounding pharmacy for their treatment because many times the medicine prescribed to them doesn’t suit them and may have severe side effects. So let’s see what it is.
What Is Compounding?
Compounding is a practice where a licensed pharmacist and a licensed physician, combines and mixes or modify the ingredients of a drug to create a medicine to fulfill the needs of an individual patient.
A Compound Pharmacy is able to create custom medications for patients with chronic pain!
What Is A Compounding Pharmacy?
Compounding is the scientific art of preparing customized medicines for patients. A drug is modified by a licensed pharmacist to meet the needs of a patient because the commercially prescribed drugs do not address the needs. This method allows the compounding pharmacist to work with the patient and the prescriber to customize a medication to meet the specific requirements of a patient. A compounding pharmacist can customize the drugs into flavored liquids, topical creams or other dosage forms that suit the patient’s unique needs. Compounding does not duplicate the drug products that are commercially available in the market. Many times the commercial drug prescribed by a doctor cannot meet the patient needs. Here are examples of why compounding pharmacy is necessary.
- A young child may need a small dosage of liquid drug made only in adult dosage tablets,
- A person may be allergic to the one or more ingredient in the commercially prescribed drug.
In such cases, we require compounding pharmacy, as they can make a drug for a kid with proper dosage and can also modify a drug without any offending ingredients for an allergic patient.
How Can A Compounding Pharmacy Help Patients?
Many time patients are allergic to certain medicines and so to satisfy the needs of such patients, a compounding pharmacy is necessary to modify the medication. A compounding pharmacist changes the drug in certain ways like:
- Adjust the strength or dosage that suits the patient
- Adds flavor to medicine to make the taste better, like for a child.
- Modify and reformulate the drug so that they can remove an unwanted ingredient that a patient is allergic to like for example gluten or a dye.
- Many patients have difficulty swallowing oral medicines so, compounding pharmacist changes the form of medication for the patients.
Learn more about compounding and compounding pharmacies by reading our article Topical Compounds for Chronic Pain Relief and The Case for Compounding: Feature Interview with Compound Pharmacist Ben Kadkhoda.
How A Compounding Pharmacy Differs From Drug Manufacturing
Drug manufacturing is a bulk production of medications that are approved by FDA. These drugs are sold to pharmacies, health care practitioners or another person who is authorized by the state or federal law to resale them.
Whereas compounding pharmacists cannot produce any drugs in bulk quantity, the drugs produced by compounding pharmacies are for meeting the unique needs of patients. The compounded drugs are not for resale.
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