Check who treats you and the pharmacy’s licence

Check the person and the pharmacy separately

• Get the complete name of whoever will provide your care

  Ask for their professional role, licence details and the state where they can provide your care.

• Use the right public record

  State medical boards make doctors’ licence status and public records of action against them available to check. What the records show varies by state.

• Get the pharmacy’s full name

  Find out who makes the medicine and who supplies it to you, rather than relying on the service’s name.

• Check the pharmacy record

  The Food and Drug Administration, or FDA, directs readers to state pharmacy boards, the bodies that license pharmacies.

Match the record to the care you need

The Federation of State Medical Boards provides links to state licensing bodies for doctors with MD or DO after their names.

MD means medical doctor. DO means doctor of osteopathic medicine; both are types of doctor. Some states have a separate licence search for each, so ask which letters follow your doctor’s name.

For online care, check the rules of the state you will physically be in at the time of care. The person treating you needs that state’s licence or other permission, such as online-care registration where the state allows it.

In most states, a pharmacy shipping medicine from another state must first obtain a licence or permit for the patient’s state.

Do not replace the record with a badge

A facility’s FDA registration does not approve its products or show that those products can be lawfully marketed.

Accreditation is a check by an outside organisation. For example, a pharmacy quality check called PCAB looks at how a pharmacy makes medicines and whether it follows quality standards. It checks the process, rather than each batch, and does not replace a pharmacy licence.

The US consumer-protection agency is the Federal Trade Commission; it warns that a polished page or a seal that looks official can be faked.