Dr. Palermo Enhances Patient Outcomes Through Root-Cause Functional Medicine and Compounding

What I've learned over the last 20 years is that not all compounding pharmacies are the same. I've been to Pioneer many, many times - seen their locations, seen their modern instrumentation, visited their staff who are all dedicated and more than willing to help. Besides them being trained, they want to help. And because of that, when my patients come back from Pioneer they have nothing but the highest compliments. The other thing that we need to know is that they send out their batches to a third-party lab, which I can tell you many other compounding pharmacies do not. So I know and I trust that they're getting the quality and the potency that's necessary. And the other thing with Pioneer is, if I'm having a patient with an allergic sensitivity to a capsule, we'll develop something else that they can take that they're not sensitive to. Jean and Michael will go to any practitioner's office for free to help them. They'll use science- based evidence. They're willing to assist in finding resources for special patient cases and they are dedicated to help us practitioners. Hello, I'm Dr. Nicholas Palermo. I'm certified in family medicine. I have been in practice for well over 45 years in the Manchester and Glastonbury, Connecticut area. I'm on the staff of the Eastern Connecticut Health Network. I am also an associate professor at the University of New England of College of Osteopathic Medicine. I'm the past president of the Connecticut Osteopathic Medical Society and I'm also very much involved in the family medicine residency program. In fact, I was the first program director for Manchester Memorial Hospital's family medicine residency program. It really wasn't until about 25 years ago that one of my very wise and older esteemed fellow colleagues, mentioned to me that Pioneer existed when I was telling him about the various issues I was having with infants and children and especially a geriatric age. They needed something different. He told me about Pioneer and I was very fortunate to go where they originally were - which is in Newington - and meet the licensed compounding pharmacist Gene Gresh, who introduced me into a whole different world of medicine and pharmaceuticals. He was the one that helped me with gummies and troches and liquids and special formulations that I needed for my infants, children's and adults. So that was a tremendous breakthrough for me. I also found out that Gene is more than just a compounding pharmacist. He's a researcher, a scientist. As a matter of fact he is a graduate of the Institute of Functional Medicine. I never even knew what functional medicine was. And he was the one that help me understand - especially for chronic diseases, chronic illnesses and disorders - that we just don't treat presenting signs, symptoms or chief complaints but we need to go to what's the root cause or causes. So, since that time I've been using Pioneer for a number of different areas. What I discovered, I was falling short in treatment. You know, conventional medicine is primarily about acute cases and not the chronic cases, not the cases that have autoimmune neurodegenerative issues. We're just not taught that in medical school. And we also aren't taught about alternative, complementary or even just natural medicine that can be an augmentation to what we're doing and to regular pharmaceuticals. I think one of the examples that I best can give is the treatment of hypothyroidism. I would be treating patients with levothyroxine and I'd have to keep increasing the dosage and I didn't know why. Gene was able to help me and certainly give me the scientific evidence that there are co-factors that are needed in order to enhance the pharmaceutical. In the case of thyroid we need Vitamin D, iodine, zinc, ferritin, and others. And when I did that I found that my treatment was much more efficacious and my patients were very much more happy with this. So that's just one example. Gene introduced me to so many different things that aren't taught in medical school. He also taught me the difference between quality nutraceuticals and those that are not. Compounding pharmacy is not just the pharmacy itself, it's the people who work there.