What Is a Prescription Pharmacy (and When Do You Need One)?
If you have ever needed a medicine prepared in a special way, you may have had to use the services of a prescription pharmacy . According to the USP Convention, formulation is “preparing, mixing, assembling, modifying, packaging, and labeling a medicinal product” or device based on a prescription or at the direction of a supplier.
Examples of compounding include the preparation of a specific dose of a drug; making a flavored version of a medicine, whether it’s mixed with syrup for a child or a chewy treat for a pet; change the composition of the drug to get rid of any non-essential allergens, such as lactose; or changing the form of the medication, such as mixing it with liquid for patients who cannot swallow pills.
Companion pharmacies exist because sometimes commercially available medicines are simply not suitable for a patient’s needs. This is when the pharmacy (and pharmacist) producing the prescriptions can intervene. While most pharmacies (and pharmacists) can make a limited number of prescriptions, more specialized orders often go to places that specialize in prescriptions, where pharmacists have specialized tools, training, and ingredients available.
How to use a prescription pharmacy
The compound medicine is prepared specifically for the individual patient and requires a prescription. Of the approximately 56,000 pharmacies in the United States, about 7,500 are specialty prescription pharmacies. You can search the Alliance For Pharmacy Compounding website to find a pharmacy near you that prepares drugs. If your doctor wants to prescribe a drug to be bought at a pharmacy, he will probably also have a local recommendation.
As Alliance For Pharmacy Compounding suggests, it is advisable to ask about quality standards when choosing a prescription pharmacy, including whether they meet USP standards ; pharmacy staff training; the mixing process by which your medicine will be prepared, including sterile procedures for any eye drops or injections; and whether they are accredited by the Pharmacy Accreditation Council .
What you need to know
There have been several warnings and controversies in the past due to unsafe drugs being prepared in pharmacies, including the 2012 fungal meningitis outbreak , when 753 patients in 20 states developed a fungal infection after being injected with a contaminated drug that was prepared by a prescription pharmacy. Since then, the FDA has periodically issued warnings about contaminated foods prepared in pharmacies.
More recently, the FDA issued a warning about individual formulations of semaglutide , which is the active ingredient found in Ozempic and Wegovy , being sold at lower prices in pharmacies due to an FDA loophole that states that patented drugs can be formulated during a shortage. .
However, as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently warned, there are a number of risks associated with the use of these combination drugs, as side effects have been reported in patients using them . The company that makes semaglutide does not sell it in a form that can be used in pharmacies; instead, these pharmacies may use research grade semaglutide salts. The FDA says they don’t “know” how it can be done legally – which means the mixed “Ozempic” is probably not the real deal.
As noted by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), one of the main differences between a commercially available drug and a compound drug is that the quality standards are different. A commercially available drug must go through an FDA approval process and be subject to a series of quality control rules, whereas a compound drug is not considered FDA approved. A mixed drug may be made from an FDA-approved drug, but the mixing process has a different set of rules and regulations that are not subject to FDA approval.