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Custom compounding provides easier access to medicine and helps improve medication management.
Most people don’t ever think about the inner workings of their neighborhood pharmacy. That’s because, at least from the outside in, services often seem effortless and efficient. You provide the pharmacist with your prescription, wait 20 minutes, and walk out with exactly what you need to stay healthy or relieve your symptoms.
Behind the counter, however, pharmacists are busy at work – especially if you visit a compounding pharmacy. These special facilities focus on building medications from the ground up with base ingredients. This allows the pharmacist to create customized drug formulations tailored to the individual patient’s needs.
This is an incredibly valuable service. We’ll tell you why, and explain how custom compounding can help you better manage medications, in this post.
1. Access Discontinued/Short Medications
The availability of drugs on the open market can change at the drop of a hat here in the United States for many reasons. Sometimes, a new treatment or drug finally becomes available – and that’s a real boon for patients who have been waiting to access it for months or years.
Unfortunately, the opposite can also be true. When drug shortages occur or manufacturers simply stop producing a drug, access can become difficult or even downright impossible in as little as a few short weeks. Patients who once found it easy to fill a prescription might suddenly struggle to find a pharmacy to help them.
A custom compounding pharmacy can help you to access these discontinued or short medications by recreating them from scratch. They essentially offer you a reasonable facsimile containing the same base ingredients, which provide the same benefits you’ve come to trust. There’s no need to change medications or try new drugs until you find something else that works.
If you’re wondering whether you can really trust a pharmacy to manufacture a drug for you, the answer is yes – absolutely. Custom compounding facilities often meet or even exceed the same national standards as drug manufacturers, both in where they source their ingredients from and in the processes they use to create drugs.
2. Avoid Allergens
Medication allergies can be extremely serious. They run the gamut from a simple and mild case of itchy eyes to full-blown hives and even anaphylactic shock. Fortunately, this is rare – but it’s still important to do what you can to avoid known allergens.
Pharmacists work really hard to ensure that patients never come into contact with allergens at any time in the first place. But what happens when every commercially available medication contains the same known allergen or filler (e.g., wheat or gluten)? When there’s no alternative available on the market, your compounding pharmacy might be able to help.
Custom compounding allows the pharmacist to effectively rebuild a drug without known allergy triggers. They simply replace the problem ingredient with another that’s known to be safe for you to ingest or use. For example, they might replace wheat-based fillers with cornstarch. Or, they might take out lactose, which is commonly used as a binder in pills, and replace it with a substance such as calcium carbonate instead.
Whatever it is you’re allergic to – a filler, a binder, or even the drug itself – there is an option available to eliminate it. All you have to do is ask your pharmacist to help you find a solution that works for your needs.
3. Add Flavorings
Taking medication isn’t always a pleasant experience – especially if your medication is extremely bitter, difficult to swallow, or instantly triggers your gag reflex. You know you need to take your medication, but you start watching the clock when medication time rolls around, dreading taking your next dose.
Or, maybe the medication isn’t for you, but your child or the family pet instead. They want absolutely nothing to do with it even if you know it’s what’s best for them because it tastes downright awful. Can you blame them? Just about every parent (pet, child, or otherwise) has experienced this exact situation at least once!
Situations like these are more common than you might think – and they’re also incredibly easy to fix. Your custom compounding pharmacy can help ease the tension by adding special flavorings that make medication time easy, effortless, and even a little bit tasty, all without jeopardizing the drug’s basic effects.
The most common example of this is adding flavorings to particularly bitter or sour children’s medications. In fact, pharmacies often add either banana or bubble gum flavoring to amoxicillin suspension (an antibiotic) when prescribing it to children for this very reason. Kids prefer the flavor and are far more likely to cooperate.
In the case of pets, the flavors offered up are typically a little less palatable to the human tongue. Common examples include fish, chicken, and bacon. While that might not sound entirely appealing to you, it’s a heck of a lot more acceptable to your pet!
4. Change Route of Administration
Your custom compounding facility can do so much more than just adding fun flavors to medications prescribed for little ones. They can also change the format of a drug to better suit your needs. For example, if you’re having trouble swallowing pills, they can sometimes create a liquid, dissolving strip, or chewable lozenge instead. Or, they might turn it into a topical cream that absorbs through your skin instead.
Other potential dosage formulas include:
- Lozenges
- Candies
- Nasal sprays
- Sublingual wafers (these melt under your tongue)
- Suppositories
- Emulsions (these thicker liquids may be easier to swallow)
There are differences in exactly how each specific medication can be reformulated. For example, some pills simply won’t work as liquids, and some liquids just can’t be reformulated into powders or pills. Your pharmacist can help you discover what options exist for your individual medication – all you have to do is ask.
Is Custom Compounding Right for You?
The bottom line, here, is that you shouldn’t suffer in silence when medication time is a struggle. Reach out to your pharmacy and see if there’s anything they can do to help. Treatment should be a time of healing, not of stress and worry!
