Cook’s Pharmacy is a compounding pharmacy. Compounding pharmacies serve to provide personalized medicine. Traditionally, compounding pharmacies make drugs prescribed by doctors for patients whose needs cannot be met in the same way by commercially available drugs. Compounding drugs involves combining, mixing or changing ingredients in medications to be tailored to the needs of an individual.
Examples of situations where people might benefit from compounding pharmacies include:
Children who need smaller, liquid doses of drugs made for adults in larger tablets
People who have allergies to commonly used fillers in drugs such as gluten and dyes
Individuals who require more specialized and specific dosages of drugs
Drugs are absorbed or excreted abnormally or ineffectively
Flavoured additives are needed for liquid medications
There are requirements for multiple medications combined in various doses
In these instances, compounding pharmacies would manufacture the drugs to suit the needs of the person’s specifications by tailoring drug doses, not including the ingredients that cause allergic reactions, etc.
Compounding pharmacies, like Cook’s Pharmacy, will each specialize in a variety of different medications.
These drugs range from dermatological medications such as:
As well, other medications which can include:
Compounding pharmacies can provide common pain management and pain relief medications for symptoms such as headaches, injuries, post-surgery recovery, chronic pain (arthritis, fibromyalgia, etc.), shingles, and anal fissures.
A regular pharmacy will not fill prescriptions for compounded drugs, if your doctor writes you a prescription for one, you must get it filled at a compounding pharmacy like Cook’s Pharmacy.
Compounding pharmacies are not the same as typical pharmacies. Other pharmacies do not have the required resources, necessary state-of-the-art information, chemicals, and required techniques to properly customize your medications based on your needs.
Speak to our compounding pharmacist team if you have any questions about compounding or how we can help you.
Think of compounding pharmacies as a doorway into personalized medicine that suits your specific needs and individual requirements as a patient.
You can be offered specific dosing, varying strengths, sizes and medication shapes, dye, preservative and lactose-free dosage forms, custom flavouring, as well as potentially providing unavailable or discontinued drugs.
As well, compounding pharmacies can offer medication reviews, online refills, as well as free prescription refills and delivery.
For some patients, compounded drugs can be life-changing, and in other cases, life-saving.
Early chemists had extensive knowledge about natural substances and their specific uses.
They compounded a variety of different products that included:
The very first drugstores were opened and operated by Muslim pharmacists in Baghdad in 754. The modern age of pharmacy compounding did not begin until the 19th century with the isolation of compounds from coal tar to produce synthetic dyes.
During the 1800s, pharmacists began specializing in the preparation of crude drugs that come from natural sources, like opium. Eventually, pharmacists from this period began isolating and identifying the active ingredients in these new and improved drug concoctions.
With the isolation of medications from crude drugs came the birth of the modern pharmaceutical company. Pharmacists were trained to compound the preparations made by the drug companies, but they could not do it efficiently on a small scale.
With the turn of the 20th century came greater government regulation of the practice of medicine. These new regulations forced the drug companies to prove that any new medication they brought to market was safe. With the discovery of penicillin, modern marketing techniques and brand promotion, the drug manufacturing industry came of age.
Pharmacists continued to compound most prescriptions until the early 1950s when most dispensed drugs started to come directly from the large pharmaceutical companies.
