What Are Beakers Used for in the Pharmacy?

Pharmacies, staffed by clinical pharmacists, provide medication, offer health care advice and guide patients through medication use. Not all medications arrive at pharmacies ready for patient use, so pharmacists mix, prepare and dispense individually prepared prescriptions. This process is called compounding, which requires special equipment, such as beakers and measuring tools.

Beakers

• Glassware is an important tool in every pharmacy

  Beakers are simple containers used for mixing, stirring and heating liquids. Beakers have flat edges, while flasks have angled edges, but both flasks and beakers are used in pharmaceutical practice. At the simplest level, beakers are used to measure proper doses of liquid and solid prescription medication. In addition, specialized spouts, openings or attachments aid in pharmaceutical compounding, allowing pharmacists to heat and combine different medications, and to reshape or melt pills too large to be taken otherwise.

Compounding

• Compounding involves custom-mixed medical solutions for individually-tailored treatments. Elderly patients, patients with multiple health care issues and patients with physical ailments or other special needs all benefit from compounding medication. Compounding can involve simply mixing multiple medications to reduce the required number of dosages, or encouraging complimentary medication to improve the effects.

Specific Examples

• Beakers and glassware are used in compounding for both human and animal patients. Medication melted and diluted in beakers allows veterinarians to properly dose animal medication ranging from elephants to hamsters. Likewise, patients who are unable to take mass produced medication because of difficulty swallowing or inability to take topical doses benefit from pharmacist's use of beakers to specially prepare medication. Lastly, pharmacists use beakers and glassware to specially prepare medication for children who cannot handle adult doses.

Compounding Throughout History

• Compounding was particularly common before mass production guaranteed dosage amounts in medication. Pharmaceutical practices using herbs and plants to treat illnesses date back to Mesopotamian and Sumerian civilizations, hundreds of years before the Common Era. Even without modern glassware, pharmacists used bowls and jugs similarly to the modern pharmaceutical use of beakers and flasks. Compounding less common in modern pharmacies due to sophisticated mass production of medication but it - along with beakers, flasks and other glassware - still plays an important part in a complete pharmacy.