Enhancing Pet Medication Administration; Harnessing the Power of Veterinary Compounding

Pets and medication? Oh boy. This combination is sometimes a recipe for disaster, leading to lots of scratching, howling, and resistance from your favorite loved one. They might need their meds to get better. But pets aren’t typically so inclined to understand that. With the power of veterinary compounding, however, they don’t necessarily need to. However, it’s not just about making medication more appealing to pets. It’s also about ensuring a perfect fit that meets your buddy’s needs exactly. Today, we’re going to talk about just how you can improve pet medicine administration through veterinary compounding. 

Improving flavor with veterinary compounding

Do you sometimes resort to hiding your pet’s pills in their favorite food or snack then hand-feed it to them? This is surely one way to do it, but it’s not the best. While it’s not the case for all medications, food can get in the way. It can lower the absorption rate of some drugs and therefore compromise the treatment efficacy. 

Other problems of sneaking pills into your pet’s meals include: 

• When crushed, pets need to finish the entire serving otherwise they won’t get all their medicine
• Some drugs can react adversely with certain ingredients and become less potent
• Some pets, such as dogs who have a very keen sense of smell, can detect the meds, and thus refuse the meal altogether. 

There’s a better way and that’s through veterinary pharmacy compounding. When your pet simply can’t stand the taste of certain drugs, pharmacists can make things better by altering flavors. 

For instance, pharmacies such as Bay Life Compounding can mix your dog’s favorite tastes with the medication. Be that tuna, bacon, chicken, you name it, they can throw in a little something extra to get your little one excited about meal time. The result is a more pleasant and easier administration. 

Now, every time you pop the vial, they’ll think it’s snack time. In the long run, medication adherence improves as well and so do positive health outcomes for your favorite companion. 

Ensuring quicker action with compounding

Different drugs have different absorption characteristics, which also vary according to the unique physiology of your pet. In cases where fast action is desired, perhaps to alleviate certain discomforts or symptoms quickly, compounding medication can help speed things up. 

For instance, adding certain ingredients to some medication can make it much easier for your pet’s digestive system to absorb. These extra elements can hasten medication degradation within the digestive tract by making poorly soluble drugs a lot more soluble. 

Alternatively, a compounding pharmacy can also micronize the drug by changing it from a solid state to a liquid. Doing so also most certainly means better rates of solubility and medication dissolution. In a nutshell, through compounding, you can make your pet’s medication more fast-acting. 

The added benefit of enhancing the absorption characteristics of pet medication is that your loved one stays on a prescription for a much shorter period. 

Solving allergy problems for your loved one

Can a dog be allergic to medicine? Any pet can to be honest, although dogs tend to be the most susceptible. Just like you and I, your pet’s system can react negatively to certain ingredients, much the same way that we experience lactose intolerance, for example. 

A couple of red flags that could indicate drug allergies include: 

• A fading appetite
• Changing urinary habits
• Vomiting 
• Diarrhea
• Lethargy, etc. 

If your pet doesn’t hold up well with certain drugs, your pet compounding partner can help you get to the bottom of the matter. The experts can take a look at the composition of drugs, to identify allergens. 

After they’ve zeroed in on the source of the problem, they can eliminate these ingredients. Your loved one can now receive the treatment they need without having to worry about side effects or symptoms. Another side benefit of that is it could help free up more drug options- possibly even stronger ones- that were previously a no-go for your family. 

Switching administration routes altogether

Sometimes, the reason why your pet is having difficulty with certain medications may have absolutely nothing to do with its flavor or ingredients. It could be down to an underlying condition. 

For example, some pets can have dysphagia. This is a condition where your loved one has trouble swallowing. Perhaps, ingestion takes quite a lot of time and effort or results in throwing up. Consequently, this may make oral drug administration very problematic, or even rule it out entirely. 

To make your pet comfortable and ensure she still gets the medicine she needs, you could turn to a pet compounding pharmacy for drug form alteration. If a drug is conventionally available in pill or tablet form, the pharmacy can compound it to a transdermal gel, for instance, thereby avoiding the need for oral ingestion. 

Tuning down high dosage strengths in commercial medication

Generic medication isn’t always available in the right dosage strengths for your loved one.  Commercially available drugs are available in certain pre-determined or standardized dosages, which can be too high or too low depending on certain unique characteristics such as the weight of the patient.

A veterinary compounding pharmacy can alter drug dosage strength accordingly to meet the distinct needs of your loved one in terms of:

• Your loved one’s size and age
• The severity of the condition being targeted by the treatment 
• Other medication she might be on and so much more

On the flip side, low dosage strength can lead to drug tolerance. Pharmacists get around this by amplifying the drug’s potency should commercially available medication fall short. 

Vet Compounding might just be what your pet needs

Veterinary compounding can make pet medication administration better in many ways. In addition to all the ways we’ve discussed, such a pharmacy can also merge multiple medications into a single dose. This lowers the administration burden for both you and your pet, allowing you to kill two birds with one stone. The result is that it also becomes much easier to keep up with medication, and you save a couple of bucks as well. Are you contemplating whether a vet compounding pharmacy is the right fit for you and your loved one? You can chat more about it with the friendly pharmacists over at Bay Life Compounding. Visit their website now.