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Compounding Pharmacies

2012-10-05 21:54:34.721334+00 by Dan Lyke 1 comments

In light of the spinal meningitis outbreak that's happening right now, the New York Times looks at compounding pharmacies, and why you would and wouldn't want to use them.

[ related topics: Health Invention and Design Current Events New York ]

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#Comment Re: made: 2012-10-06 02:36:50.032827+00 by: other_todd

There is a compounding pharmacy in my neck of the woods and we've never had nor heard anything but good about them. They're the only place - I mean, the only place in the whole greater Boston area - we can go to get pills (which we can't get cats to take) converted into liquid medicine (which we can). I'm not sure I would go to them for something as touchy as a spinal injection though.

People wouldn't continue to want an occasional compounding pharmacy if chain-drugstore "pharmacies" were still pharmacies in any sense of drug craftsmanship, rather than places where sullen teens with minimal training count twenty pills at a time from a larger bottle to a smaller one. I worked as a pharmacist's assistant in an Eckerd's my last two years in high school and I saw exactly what minimal level of rigor was needed to do that job. If I'd handed my pharmacist a mortar and pestle, much less a pill tile, I doubt he'd have recognized them.

Seems to me that the answer here would be inspection and more rigorous standards, including setting limits for what they're not allowed to do, not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I know how you feel about the steady creep of government regulation, but you must admit that a VOLUNTARY compliance standard is really not a compliance standard at all.