Ep 299 – The Rogue Pharmacist: A Journey from Pharmacy to Skin Care

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0:01:12.3 Maggie Staszcuk: Hello and welcome to ASCP and the Rogue Pharmacist with Benjamin Knight Fuchs. In each episode, we'll explore how internal and external factors can impact the skin. I'm Maggie Staszcuk, ASCP's program director, and joining me is Ben Fuchs, skincare formulator and pharmacist. Hi, Ben.

0:01:28.6 BF: Hello, Maggie. Happy New Year.

0:01:30.3 MS: Happy New Year. A lot of people are familiar with your story, but many haven't heard it. And I find it really fascinating how you transitioned from pharmacy to skincare.

0:01:41.5 BF: First of all, I should tell you that it's kind of interesting story. When I was probably in the 1990s, when I was in my 30s and I lived in Boulder, everybody was going to see therapists, psychotherapists. That was the thing. It was like a fad to go see psychotherapists. And my friends were all saying, Ben, you should go. You should go see a psychotherapist. And you know, and I was like kind of resistant. I don't need to see a psychotherapist. I don't want to go. But they talked me into it finally. And I went in to see the psychotherapist and I sat there and I talked about myself for an hour straight. And I realized why people go to psychotherapists. Because you have to talk about yourself and nobody interrupts you. And nobody asks questions and interferes and picks up the phone and they just listen to you. And so every time somebody says, I want to hear your story, I think, oh, gosh, thank you. You're like my therapist and you're helping my psychological well being. Because who doesn't like telling their story? So first of all, I am a pharmacist and I own a pharmacy, a compounding pharmacy.

0:02:36.8 BF: Compounding, as most people know by now, is where you make the medicine. And most compounding pharmacies, pharmacists and pharmacies make medicine for oral use, either strengths that don't exist or medications that don't exist. There are some pharmacies will make hormone creams and such. My compounding pharmacy is strictly dermatology. All I do is skincare because my expertise is skincare. And I developed this expertise in skincare, I started developing this expertise in skincare in pharmacy school. In pharmacy school, I always loved chemistry. I always wanted to be a chemist. And I liked food and I wanted to study the impact of food, the medicinal impact on food, on health, on various health issues. And so I thought I'd go to pharmacy school. And I don't know what I was thinking really, but I thought a pharmacist would be the guy who studies food as medicine and studies herbs, and studied herbs as medicine and nutritional supplements as medicine. But that's not what happens in pharmacy school. In pharmacy school, you study drugs. And what's worse is the first semester of pharmacy school, most of your, what you're studying is how to start a drugstore or the names of drugs or the generic names of drugs.

0:03:45.1 BF: Just things that had nothing to do with what I really wanted to study, which was chemistry and therapy and biology and such. And so I was really frustrated and I was thinking, what did I do to myself? Why am I here? Why am I in pharmacy school? I was walking through the basement of the School of Pharmacy in Boulder, and I smell this peppermint smell coming out from one of the rooms. And I walked in the room and I look and it's the coolest laboratory I'd ever seen in my life. It had these Erlenmeyer flasks and distilling glassware and ingredients and fancy equipment. I was like, this is so amazing. And there was a little guy tinkering on some beakers in the corner. And I went to the corner. I started talking to him. We start chatting, chatting him up, and we hit it off. And he says to me, Ben, hey, I need a research assistant. You want to be my research assistant? I was like, are you kidding me? Heck, yeah, I want to be a research. It's like a dream come true. I get to work in a lab. I get to do chemistry.

0:04:32.6 BF: Well, it turns out that this pepperminty smell, this lab with the peppermint smell, was the Blistex research facility. And to this day, it's in Boulder. And this is where all the Blistex products were developed. Today, there's a bunch of Blistex products, but back in the 1980s, there were only three Blistex products. And the Blistex products you see today, there's probably about, I don't know, there may be 15 or 20 of them now, were all developed in the 1980s by myself and Dr. Jones, who's the guy, who was the real guy who developed Blistex, he was a medicinal chemist and a pharmacist and a celebrity of sorts. And he taught me everything you could possibly want to know about formulations. But he taught me formulations from a medicinal standpoint, because he was a medicinal chemist and he was a pharmacist. So he taught me how you formulate products that have medicinal and therapeutic effects, how you formulate topical medicine essentially, not drug medicine, but topical medicaments that have healing effects on the skin for the lips, primarily. But also he had invented some acne products and some burn products. And I was involved in the formulations and the testing and the development of a lot of these products.

0:05:38.4 BF: In fact, one of my jobs was to come in after school, and Dr. Jones would have a stack of formulas that he had typed up on his IBM Selectric, remember the IBM Selectrics and I'd have a stack of formulas, and I was the guy who's making his formulas for him. So I learned everything you could possibly want to know about not just formulations, but about ingredients and about testing. I'd have to go to the library and do research, and I'd have to wash the dishes, and I'd have to do all kinds of stuff. And I was basically his research assistant. But I got a real soup to nuts, A to Z background and understanding and education in skincare above and beyond my pharmacy experience. Now, in pharmacy, we study skincare, we study medicinal skincare, and we study what's called transdermal penetration, which is how you get medicine into the blood through the skin. And so when I graduated pharmacy school, I had this incredible background in formulation science and how you formulate products, and I had a background in pharmacy and in medicine, and also in transdermal penetration, in creating topical products that could be used to deliver medication into the bloodstream.

0:06:36.8 BF: And so when I graduated pharmacy school, it was a natural next step to start to develop topical skincare products in the pharmacy setting. And there were a few little twists and turns before I started doing that. Long story short, I started a compounding pharmacy specifically for people who had skincare problems. And when I say skincare problems, I mean burns, traumas, skin diseases, as well as just plain old hyperpigmentation and dry skin and aging skin. And what I saw was that there was a sense of dissatisfaction that people had with their skincare products. People were not happy with their skin care. And the situation is still, is ongoing. We still have that. This is why we have so many skincare companies. Nobody's happy. That's why we have so many skincare products. Everybody's looking for the latest and greatest. Everybody's looking for the latest protocol, the latest skincare ingredients, the latest herb, the latest formulation, because nobody is satisfied and nobody is happy. In my pharmacy, I had a situation where I was dealing with sick people. And when you're dealing with sick people, you can't play the same games that the skincare business is known for.

0:07:43.5 BF: The skincare business is known for, oh, doesn't this smell nice? And oh, doesn't this look nice? And oh, doesn't this feel good on your skin? Oh, look at this package. Look at this influencer. Look at this celebrity. Those are criteria that are completely irrelevant in the world of pharmacy. If you go to the drugstore and get your high blood pressure medicine or your birth control pill or your antibiotic or whatever it is, I can't tell you, hey, Cindy Crawford loves this high blood pressure medicine. Or, oh, doesn't this birth control pill smell delicious? And look how pretty the package is. Pharmacy's real. In pharmacy, you're dealing with people who could care less about the smell or the packaging or who endorsed it. They want something that works. The criteria that we use for assessing the value of a medicine is, does it work? Well, what's the criteria that most people have or want when they're determining whether they're gonna use a skincare product or purchase a skincare product? Does it work? So skincare should be like medicine. And if skincare is not like medicine, then it is more of an experience than it is a functional product.

0:08:48.3 BF: And that's what modern skincare has devolved itself to. It's starting to change now. But for eons and by eons, I mean 150 or so years since the modern skincare business began, it has been about, doesn't it feel good, smell good, look good, who endorsed it. It hasn't been about creating changes on the skin, creating real therapeutic effects on the tissue, the organ we call the skin. And the reason is this. So why is that? Why are people doing something? It's because modern skincare is based on technologies that are 150 years old and predates our understanding of the structure of the skin. When the modern skincare business was born in the 1860s and 1870s, we didn't know about the structure of the skin or at least the substructure. We may have known about the gross structure, but not the fine structure. And we certainly didn't know about the key component in the skin and the key component in the body and its impact on the health of the body or in case of the skin, health and the beauty of the skin. And that is the cell. You see, skincare, and really healthcare should be about the cell.

0:09:57.6 BF: When we're sick, we're not sick at the level of the gallbladder or the uterus or the breast or the intestine or the lungs. We're sick at the level of the cell, the lung cell, the intestinal cell, the spleen cell, the uterine cell. Whatever the dysfunction is, the pathology is it's cellular. Likewise with the skin. When we have a skin problem, or if we just want to have beautiful skin, the functionality has to be at the level of the cell. And when modern skincare, the modern skincare business was born, we didn't know this. So skincare has become about what is happening on the surface. And this is why, when we make an assessment on the value or a determination whether we're going to buy a skincare product, what do we do? We rub it on our skin and we go, oh, that feels lovely. That feels nice. That doesn't tell you anything. That's the booby prize. What it feels like on the surface of the skin, while we want products that feel good on the surface of the skin, that has nothing to do with the cell, with the therapy or the transition of the cell of the skin to a functional, healthy cell from a cell that's less functional or less healthy.

0:11:12.3 BF: So you say, what can we do to the cell? How can we really address the cell? We see a cell has been around for three and a half billion years. Human cell, or what they call the advanced cell, or eukaryotic, which means advanced cell, maybe two and a half billion years, 2.7 billion years. And in that long time, eons, it has evolved a menu of which it needs to eat in order to be functional. And there is no emulsifying wax on the menu. There's no stearic acid on the menu. There's no cetyl alcohol on the menu. There's no silicon on the menu, there's no vegetable oil on the menu. In fact, the vast majority, 99% plus of a skincare product is not on the menu of a cell. It can't have an effect on the cell. And this accounts for the utter failure of most skincare products to do anything, and the complete disappointment that most people have with most of their skincare products. Now keep in mind, I'm dealing with sick people. I'm dealing with patients who have burns, who have fell off their bike and had a big gash on their head or a garage door fell on them and they ended up with some kind of trauma or they were post surgical, had post surgical wounds that they didn't want to have scar, whatever.

0:12:24.8 BF: These were people who were traumatized and sick. So my job in the pharmacy was to figure out how to be real, how to actually create a change in the tissue of the skin, the appearance of the skin, what we see on the surface of the skin. And the only way to do that was to get to the cell with things that the cell would eat, with substances that were on the cellular menu. And what I hit upon was the key and most important ingredients that anybody could ever use and anybody should ever use on their skin as well as internally. The most important ingredients you could put on your skin are the same class of ingredients that you can put in your body. What are the most important, what is the most important class? Not single ingredients, but class, category of ingredients that you can put in your body to get healthier, to get stronger, to anti age, to get rid of a cold or a health challenge? What is the most important class? You obviously know it.

0:13:22.2 MS: Antioxidants.

0:13:23.7 BF: That's a part of it. That's not exactly, that's more specific but broader, nutrition.

0:13:29.9 MS: Oh, sure.

0:13:30.4 BF: Nutrients.

0:13:31.2 MS: Yeah.

0:13:31.9 BF: It's nutrition. So I thought, well, why aren't we doing that topically? If the most important and the most functional and the most powerful substances a cell could ever use and the most relevant substances that a cell can use in terms of the cellular, the chemistry of a cell are its nutrition, I thought, why aren't we doing that topically? Why aren't we using topical nutrients? Now remember, this is, when I was doing this, this is 1980s. And so this is before people knew about vitamin C on the skin and other nutrients on the skin and minerals on the skin, et cetera. Today, it's almost like it's common knowledge. But back then it was radical. Nobody had any idea why you would put topical nutrients on your skin. Now, in addition to topical nutrients, because we're really talking about the cell which is located deep, relatively underneath. Remember, the skin is stratified, it's layered, as most estheticians know. It's, you got the hard stuff on the surface, the stratum corneum, and then the living cells are down below. So in addition to having the ingredients that a cell would need, you had to have a system for delivering those ingredients.

0:14:38.8 BF: And this is where my pharmacy background came in. Because we had studied transdermal penetration. We had studied how you get medicines into the bloodstream through the skin, which is why you have lidocaine patches and fentanyl patches and scopolamine patches and estrogen creams and various topical pharmaceuticals that are designed to get medicine into the bloodstream through the skin. We pharmacists look at the skin as a route of administration into the blood. And so we study transdermal penetration and ingredients that could be used to deliver things through the skin. So I thought, well, what if we mixed vitamins and minerals and amino acids and fatty acids and nutrients with transdermal penetrance and blended them together and threw out the oil and threw out the silicon and did away with the water and the wax and the emulsifier and the preservatives and all the ingredients that make up most of a skincare product and replaced it with super high concentrations of nutrients and delivery systems. What if we... Would we be able to access the cell and get the cell to upregulate, my favorite word in biochemistry, to upregulate, to enhance its secretion of connective tissue fibers, to enhance its secretion of moisture factors to support its transit, to actually get real changes in the skin from the cellular level up?

0:15:56.3 BF: And bingo, it worked like a charm. And so I started to do topical nutritional, start to formulate, compound topical nutritional products for people who had skin diseases or skin traumas or skin wounds, or even for folks who had just plain old aging skin or dry skin or weak skin. And it worked so well. I was like, let's repurpose this and let's turn this into an over the counter skincare formula, formulary or skincare line, if you will, or a brand. And that's exactly what Truth is. It's topical nutritional supplements, which are medicines really, because the most important medicine is nutrition. And that's why I wanted to get into pharmacy school in the first place, was to study nutrition as medicine. And sometimes people say to me, hey Ben, you're a pharmacist, why aren't you selling drugs? Why are you talking about nutrition? I say nutrients are what drugs dream they could be. When prednisone goes to bed at night, it dreams it was vitamin C because that's the real medicine. The drugs are simulations, they're imitations. The nutrients are really what the cell needs and at the end of the day what are deficient and that what are causing the disease states.

0:17:08.2 BF: And at the end of the day, all disease is cell disease, and all cell disease has an aspect of nutritional deficiency. So to me, being a pharmacist allows me to understand how to use the outside world, interact with the inside world to create changes. Most pharmacists do that with drugs. They take the outside world in terms of drugs and they put it in, you put it in your body and it creates changes in the inside world. But then when the body sees the drug or it gets into the body, the drug gets in the body, the body's like, who the heck are you and why are you in me? And it has to get rid of that drug, it has to detoxify that drug. And ironically, taking a drug internally creates nutritional deficiencies because nutrients are required to detoxify the drug. So now you made matters worse. The same thing is true topically. If it's not a nutritional substance like a vitamin, a mineral, an amino acid or a fatty acid, it's not going to be able to access the cell. The cell can only be accessed by nutrients. Even things like peptides and growth hormones, by the way, which sometimes can have a positive effect, will not work effectively if the cell doesn't have the nutrients.

0:18:20.2 BF: So you can use your peptides and your growth factors, but if you don't have, if the cell doesn't have vitamin C or the cell doesn't have the B complex, or zinc or magnesium or copper or any of the mighty, I call them the mighty 90 essential nutrients, the growth factor in the peptide isn't gonna work as effectively. So even things like growth factors and peptides and hormones, which are not really like, you know, synthetic, artificial, non-active ingredients, will only work if the cell has the nutrition. The nutrition is first and foremost what the cells need and thus what the tissues need, what the organs and the tissues and the organs need. And that's why I'm a nutritionist too, and if you go online and look me up, you'll see I talk about nutrition as much as I talk about skincare. And that's why all my skincare formulations feature super high concentrations of topical essential nutrients in transdermal delivery systems without fillers, waxes, emulsifiers, gums, silicon, vegetable oil, preservatives, all the things that make up the vast majority of a skincare product, including water. And that's my transition. That's my story.

0:19:24.1 MS: That concludes our show for today, and we thank you for listening. But if you just can't get enough of Ben Fuchs, the ASCP's Rogue Pharmacist, you can find him at truthtreatments.com. For more information on this episode, or for ways to connect with Ben Fuchs, or to learn more about ASCP, check out the show notes.