We've been treating pain in our local pharmacy for 30+ years. Decades ago, our chief pharmacist, Gene Gresh, would see patients from our community come in month after month to refill pain med prescriptions. Regrettably, he noticed these patients were getting sicker each month, not healthier. Determined to provide better care, Gene uprooted his whole life, went back to school, closed his conventional pharmacy, and opened one of the nation's first combined functional medicine with compounding pharmacy practices.
This new model allowed him to work one-on-one with patients and their doctors to formulate custom medicine that more effectively treated chronic pain. Over the years, much of Gene’s research focused on topicals and transdermal delivery of medication. The goal was to optimize delivery through the skin, close to the root cause, in order to improve efficacy and minimize side effects. The approach was amazingly successful for thousands of patients in the community.
There was a problem. At the time, every medicine we made required a prescription from a doctor. So, patients would often ask what over-the-counter products did we recommend for chronic pain? The answer was, “none,” due to all of the previously mentioned reasons.
So we began making them ourselves.