History Of Compounding

History of Compounding

Pharmacy compounding is the art and skill of preparing individual medications for patients. Compounded medications are made by hand by adding bits and pieces of components. Ingredients are mixed together in the exact prescription strength and dosage form suitable for the patient. This scientific method allows the compounding pharmacist to work with the patient and the physician to change a medication to meet the patient’s discrete needs. Ancient civilizations utilized pharmaceutical compounding for religion, grooming, keeping the healthy stay healthy, treating the ill and animals. They revealed poisons and the antidotes. They made ointments for wounded and crippled patients, and preparing the patients for the dead.

Pharmacy compounders compounded a selection of necessary things like medications, dyes, incense, perfumes, ceremonial compounds, preservatives and makeup. Alchemy is an influential tradition that practitioners have. Alchemy eventually played a big role in the creation of modern day pharmacy and the principles of compounding. In the Islamic world in particular, Muslim pharmacists and chemists developed radical methods of compounding drugs. The first drugstores were opened by Muslim pharmacists in Baghdad in 754. In the 1930’s and 1940s, approximately 60 percent of all medications were compounded. As the manufacturing rates went up in the 1950’s through 1960’s compounding quickly went down. The pharmacist’s role as a preparer of medications changed to dispensing the drugs and manufactured dosage forms, and most pharmacists no longer were trained to compound medications. However, once this happened, the patients’ needs were not being content. In the 1800’s, pharmacists specialized in the raising, preparation and compounding of crude drugs. Crude drugs like opium, are from natural sources and usually hold multiple chemical compounds. The compounding pharmacist often extracted these crude drugs using water or alcohol to form extracts. In the 20th century the government began to regulate the practice of medicine more closely. The new regulations forced the drug companies to prove that any new medicine brought to market was safe. Compounding is one of the oldest forms of pharmacy to exist and has played a very crucial role with advances in the medical