Do you cringe when you open your medicine only to find a horse pill you just can't swallow?  There is a specialized pharmacy on the Avera McKennan campus that has you in mind.

In the back of the Avera Doctors Plaza 2 Pharmacy is a specialized lab. What they do back there is something most of us have never heard of. They compound medicine.

Leah Thiesen is a Certified Pharmacy Technician she is making bio-identical hormones, compounding 3 active ingredients into one pill. Those types of hormones aren't patented so they aren't available in any form, except at specialized pharmacy's like this.

Pharmacist Karen Hoffman says, "The dosage, the forms aren't what the patient needs, it's a lot more specialized dosing so we are making what the patient needs. We can make more than one thing in a capsule so you only have to take one pill versus five."

It takes about 15 minutes to work all the powder into the capsule so prior to that she Leah started melting a fatty acid base on a hot plate with a magnetic stirrer. Progesterone will be added and then it will eventually be made into a suppository. This helps women maintain pregnancy.

Karen says, "There are trokies (oral progesterone) we can make for people who want to do bio-identical hormones but don't want cream because its too sticky and they don't want to take it orally because it's too hard on their tummy. So they do it on the cheek, they absorb it that way."

A lot of people have trouble swallowing pills or may be a allergic to the yellow die in a tablet. The pharmacists and techs can put that dosage in to a gel or cream or a clear capsule. There's a world of possibilities.

Making and combining medicine one prescription at a time exactly the way you want it.