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Henry C. Caldwell, PhD
Philadelphia

JAMA. 1970;212(11):1963.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.—

As an industrial pharmacist I recognize the importance of proper formulation to insure drug availability and agree with Burdick et al (211:462, 1970) that improper formulation of corticosteroids "may diminish or completely abolish the therapeutic activity." The authors correctly pointed out that triamcinolone is much less active in topical preparations than triamcinolone acetonide^1,2 and questioned whether the suggestion of Fischer³ to crush triamcinolone tablets and compound them into a commercial emulsion base would give an active product. They showed that such preparations are inactive when compared to commercial triamcinolone acetonide preparations. However, they did not show that extemporaneous formulations are inferior to commercial formulations of the same compound.

There are questions I would like to raise.

1. (1) The identification of the active ingredient in the six prescriptions is very important, and I wondered about the "tentative identification." Do the authors plan additional testing or
   

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