Specialized for Compounding

Pharmacy Compounding is the long-established tradition in pharmacy that allows pharmacists to specially prepare customized medications for a specific patient, to meet certain individual needs, when a prescriber asks for that benefit.

Pharmacy Compounding involves combining or mixing approved ingredients to create customized medications, without altering the theraputic effect of the ingredients, but with some benefit or improvement being delivered to the patient or prescriber.

Specialized Pharmacy is one of 1,800 accredited members of the International Society of Compounding Pharmacists.

Situations that Indicate Compounding

• When needed medications are discontinued by or generally unavailable from pharmaceutical companies, often because the medications are no longer profitable to manufacture
• When the patient is allergic to certain preservatives, dyes or binders in available off-the shelf medications
• When treatment requires tailored dosage strengths for patients with unique needs
• When a pharmacist can combine several medications the patient is taking to increase compliance
• When the patient cannot ingest the medication in its commercially available form and a pharmacist can prepare the medication in cream, liquid or other form that the patient can easily take
• When medications require flavor additives to make them more palatable for some patients

Safety & Suitability Guidelines

To ensure safety and suitability, Specialized Pharmacy follows the compounding guidelines:

• The compounded product is individually prescribed for a specific and identified patient
• The active substance can qualify for use in compounding, because one or more of the following apply:
1. It is found in an FDA-approved drug.
2. It is listed in a reference of widely used drug substances published by the United States Pharmacopeial Convention, an independent standard-setting organization.
3. It is listed in an FDA rule as acceptable for pharmacy compounding.
• The compound must not have been marketed previously, then been found to be unsafe or ineffective and subsequently removed from the market for that reason
  
• The compound must not contain drug products listed in FDA regulations as difficult to compound