My first recollection of the word “compounding” was while I was attending pharmacy school at Drake University.  I had a “compounding lab” during my third year of pharmacy school.  To me at the time, it was an easy class to get in and out of and have a free afternoon!  Little did I know that this would become my lifelong career.  Fast forward about ten years, and I was very happy being a pharmacist at Uptown Pharmacy, a “neighborhood” pharmacy located a mile west of Drake. I started working there in 1982, and purchased it in 1989.  During the spring of 1993 a member of PCCA (Professional Compounding Centers of America) from Houston, Texas walked into my pharmacy.  I was intrigued by his talk about becoming a “compounding pharmacy” and was looking for a niche at the time.  Most neighborhood pharmacies were slowly being sold out to local chains and I did not want that to happen to me.  I was losing money hand over fist to insurance companies and trying to stay afloat.  I did a survey and on 93% of my regular prescriptions that I filled, I was actually PAYING to fill them! What a crazy business! 

Shorly thereafter I attended my first "PCCA" meeting at Creighton Pharmacy School in Omaha, Nebraska. This was a meeting to learn more about the art of compounding.  I came home from the meeting all excited as I did not realize the unique services that compounding could offer to patients.  In June of 1993 I joined PCCA and went to Houston, Texas, their home office, for additional training.  After the training, I could hardly sleep learning about all the ways compounding could help kids, animals, hospice patients, environmentally sensitive patients and so on. 

By default due to being in the compounding field, I began my journey learning about compounded “Natural” or “Bio-Identical”, “BHRT”, or “Human Identical” hormones. For the most part in the early nineties, in order to obtain natural hormones you needed a compounding pharmacist. The natural hormones had been around since the 1930’s but had been overtaken with the advent of synthetic hormones in the 1940’s-1970’s. Natural hormones, because of their source, could not be patented by drug companies so there was no economic incentive for them to go that route. As my compounding practice grew, so did my knowledge of hormones. My passion to try and find out how hormones related to various types of hormone related cancers was fueled by being exposed to the world of natural hormones.

I started going to hormone conferences every 6-8 weeks around the country to learn from the experts. Ten years ago I had requests from local physicians to help them help their patients. The word spread that I was learning about hormones, awareness among baby boomers was occurring, and women were demanding help! I knew that in order to help women we needed to test their hormones. A novel idea since it currently wasn’t being done at least in this part of the country! It didn’t make any logical sense to give women hormones without testing them first to see what they were deficient in and then second, once they were on hormones to make sure they were in balance and in a safe range. I immediately started helping women by using saliva testing, which has been around since 1959, and it has been extremely rewarding! At that time, I started doing “hormone consultation and evaluations” on women by physician referrals. I spend on average 2 hours with a patient interpreting symptoms and tests to come up with a “plan” to help balance their hormones. As of today, my youngest patient is 12 years old and my oldest is 92 and this includes male hormone balance as well.

I separated my compounding business in 1996 from the business of filling regular prescriptions and “Central Iowa Compounding” was started.  In the summer of 2000 we moved to our present location in Urbandale at that time became “compounding only”.  I has been a very rewarding and fun way to practice pharmacy……nothing like I ever imagined I would be doing when I took my first “compounding lab” at Drake!