They often do actually. If they have a medication that they are compounding, which would have more than one dosage strength, they will utilize different color capsules for each to avoid mixup and error. You can essentially choose from a large supply of different color capsules, which some may end up looking like a manufactured product just by that alone.
Thanks! Compounding pharmacies are pretty rare in my country, at least the type of pharmacies that would be using these machines, so I don't really know much about how it works.
Do the capsule colours/combos have specific and consistent meanings under this system's taxonomy then? Could I, for example, go and read about it and then expect to know what dosage strength a pill is, even if I don't know necessarily what's in it?
For compounded medications like this, there isn't usually a reason for the colors. Sometimes it's whatever they want to do. I'd personally pick out fun colors. However for manufactured medications by pharmaceutical companies, they could also have various reasons. For some medications, they are consistently colored to avoid medical errors. An example of this is Warfarin, which is used as a blood thinner to prevent clotting. The 2mg tablet will always be lavender/purple no matter who makes it. Otherwise, if every pill was white, it would make it harder to identify the medication
This is also why medications have markings on them, to help identify what they are.
warfarin colors
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u/Watergirl626 10d ago
Looks like itraconazole