How shortages have affected compounding permissions — does this still hold?

Shortage predictions: regulators and suppliers issue shortage alerts before they become acute. Checking the regulatory website for shortages gives you advance notice.

Adding a source would improve this post and I do not have one to hand.

Shortage status determines what compounding is permitted in some jurisdictions, which links two questions that otherwise seem unrelated.

Not disagreeing with anyone above, just adding the bit I keep having to look up.

I had written a reply contradicting post #13 and deleted it. Here is what survived.

For anyone finding this later: the short answer on shortages is that it depends on one thing, and the rest of the thread is people identifying which thing.

Shortages is one of those subjects where the general answer and the answer for a specific case diverge, and the thread will go in circles until someone says which one is being asked for.

Reports that a pharmacy has stock are the least durable information on the site and are still worth posting with a date.

Reading rather than contributing, but this is the most useful thread I have found on it.

Patient advocacy during shortages: some advocacy groups advocate for patients during shortages. Knowing who they are and following their communication is useful.

Building on post #22 rather than restating it.

Both are useful and different. The notice tells you the national position; the account tells you what is happening on the ground.

Post #22 put the caveat in the right place and I want to underline it.

My experience of shortages contradicts the reply above. I am posting it as a data point rather than as a refutation, because one person's experience is exactly that.

Worth separating shortages as a question about the compound from shortages as a question about the documentation. They get answered by different people and only one of them is answerable here.

Second this, and I would have said it less carefully.

Taking post #25 at face value and following it one step further.

Dose hold versus tapering: if a temporary shortage forces a gap, holding your dose and resuming when supply returns is different from gradually tapering. The two are different decisions.

That has held every time I have looked, which is not the same as always.

I would put moderate confidence on the mainstream reading of shortages and no more. That is not scepticism for its own sake; it is where the sourcing actually stops.

Post #27 is right about the mechanism and I think understates the practical bit.

Compounding during shortages: some jurisdictions allow pharmacy compounding when a marketed product is in shortage. That permission is jurisdiction-specific and time-limited (usually for the duration of the shortage).

It is the sort of thing that seems obvious in retrospect and was not at the time.

Adding the boring version of shortages, because the interesting version keeps getting posted and the boring one is usually right.

Check the ordinary explanations, in order, and stop when one of them accounts for what you are seeing. Most of the time the second one does.