A Spoonful of Compounding Services Helps the Medicine go Down
If you are allergic to particular ingredients within a medicine or struggle to take pills orally, then your doctor may be required to approach your local pharmaceutical company and request the use of their compounding services. This is a service that requires additional training for individual pharmacists but allows them to create tailored medicines for individual patients to increase the effectiveness and digestibility of the medicine. It is one of the oldest aspects of creating medicine stretching back thousands of years and is still an important part of medical development, yet compounding is growing less common because of the additional training required.
Legal Requirements
In order to be able to legally offer compounding services pharmacy employees must do additional training with a registered organisation such as the Professional Compounding Chemists of Australia (PCCA) and The Pharmacy Guild of Australia (TGA), both of which offer accredited courses and regulated standards to ensure legal and safe practice.
Why Use Compounding Services?
According to the PCCA, compounding services have a variety of different benefits, such as the ability to recreate drugs that are out of production and tailor products to accommodate people with a variety of different dietary restrictions. For example, the gel caps that are used for some pills can often contain gelatin, which clearly isn't suitable for vegetarians. A compounding service would be able to change these for caps and make them from cellulose instead. They can also remove certain ingredients that may cause side-affects such as diarrhoea and stomach pain in people who are intolerant to lactose and certain dyes. If you have young children who refuse to take their medicine, you can even get a compounding service that adds a variety of different flavours to the pills or liquid to give it a candy-like taste, making it much less stressful when getting them to take their medication.
Workout Compounds
Compounding is also something that some fitness enthusiasts do at home, but clearly this is something that should be done using only legally available workout supplements in the correct proportions. You can actually buy machines that will cap the pills for you, allowing you to take powdered products, such as creatine monohydrate and superfood green powders, and turn them into pills. This makes them easier for some people to swallow whilst making them more portable and easier to measure when on a strict supplement regime. Some people even go so far as to design and make their own pre-workouts using things like creatine, beta-alanine and caffeine.
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