Compounding… A Precise and Careful Process.
Until the 20th century, all pharmacies were compounding pharmacies, meaning they combined one or more active ingredients into a customized treatment for an individual patient’s needs. Today, very few pharmacies provide this type of personalized service.
Desert Naturopathic Health uses compounding pharmacies such as Women’s International Pharmacy, Potters House Apothecary, and others, in order to provide high-quality bioidentical hormone therapies. Compounding pharmacies formulate combinations of pharmaceutical-grade ingredients, as prescribed by a healthcare practitioner, into specific dosage forms such as capsules, creams, gels, tablets, lozenges, suppositories and other forms.
Benefits of working with a compounding pharmacy include:
- Healthcare practitioners can prescribe medication specific to their patient’s individual needs instead of only having access to standardized, commercially available dosages, strengths and forms.
- Patients are less likely to experience side effects if their prescriptions can be tailored to their specific needs.
- Healthcare practitioners can more easily fine-tune or modify the dose or prescription as an individual’s needs change, or match an individual’s preferences and absorption abilities.
- Compounded prescriptions can be customized to different formulations that may be more efficient or easier to administer. For example, if a patient has difficulty swallowing pills, the compounding pharmacist may be able to formulate the medication as a cream or gel.
- Multiple prescriptions can be combined into a single dosage form for convenience and to ensure better patient compliance.
- Preservative-free or allergen-free prescriptions can be compounded for sensitive patients.
- Flavoring can be added to make drops and lozenges more palatable, if desired.
Compounding pharmacies (and pharmacists) adhere to standards and regulations set by the U.S. Pharmacopeia, National Association of Boards and State Boards of Pharmacy for quality assurance and accuracy. Women’s International Pharmacy is meticulous in meeting the industry’s highest quality standards of compounded medications.