Extemporaneous compounding. The end of the road?

Extemporaneous compounding has long been a part of dermatology. It has served to produce niche therapies that otherwise would have been poorly treated with available drugs. Increasingly however, the unpredictable nature of compounded medications, both in effectiveness, as well as safety and stability of such products, has diminished the use of this approach. The increasing availability of new pharmaceutical drugs that fill these niches more effectively, coupled with economic and legal concerns over the practice of compounding make it a tradition with an increasingly limited role in dermatology today. It is safe to predict that in the near future, compounding will virtually disappear from dermatology, as it already has from virtually all other medical specialties.