Compounding pharmacy is the process that involves custom preparation of prescriptions by pharmacists. This is different from the common drug prescription distribution because most prescription drugs are allocated in the dosage forms in which they were manufactured. In compounding pharmacy, a pharmacist begins with a drug in its raw form and treats it in different ways until it is ready to be used by a patient. Most of the drugs in pharmacies require only very little preparation by pharmacists. These come in manufactured forms such as inhalers, tablets and other preparations that are ready for use by patients after distribution. In rare cases, patients need drugs in dosages that are different from those commonly available. This means that the patient needs to use the drug in a form that is not from the manufacturers. In such a case, pharmacists use compounding skills to create drugs in the forms that patients need.
There are different ways in which compounding pharmacy can be accomplished or achieved. For patients that experience problems when swallowing, pharmacists might have to crush tablets and mix them with transdermal gels. The active ingredients might have to be measured, mixed and encapsulated for those patients who need smaller doses. This is also done for the patients who are allergic to chemicals that come in the manufactured dosage form. If a physician gives directions, a pharmacist might mix chemicals and drugs that are normally not distributed together. Compound pharmacy requires that pharmacists use great skill and a lot of care. If actions of compounding are not done in the right way, they might lead to injuries and death. To make sure that wrong dosages and incompatible chemicals are not used, it is important to exercise caution during compounding.
Compounding pharmacy is not limited to humans because animals too, take some of the drugs that people take but in different dosages and forms. Pharmacists can prepare smaller dosages of drugs for animals when directed by veterinarians and prepare medicine in transdermal gels for animals that refuse to swallow pills. Compounding rx usa pharmacy might seem like a new practice but it has been around for many years. Many pharmacists have always purified, prepared and distributed as well as extracted many drugs before the 20th Century. This is because there was no mass production of medicine as is the case today and pharmacists had to create medicine from plants and other sources. Increase in the methods of preparing medicine and the improvement of technology have led to mass production techniques being applied to pharmacies. This led to the development of modern pharmacy where compounding skills are used but not as frequent as they were some years ago.
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