Telehealth and online prescriptions

An online prescriber works under two sets of rules, and both matter more than any company's marketing. State medical boards decide what counts as a legitimate evaluation and where a clinician must be licensed; federal law decides which drugs may be prescribed without an in-person visit at all. This pillar collects the guides that read those rules from their sources, and the GLP-1 program directory applies them program by program, with each program's price and legal entity read from its own pages and dated.

The practice of medicine happens where the patient is, so a prescriber must be licensed in the state where you are at the time of the visit. State boards require a documented evaluation and history before any prescription, and the Federation of State Medical Boards' 2022 policy is explicit that prescribing from a static questionnaire alone is not acceptable. GLP-1 telehealth: how online prescribing works follows a visit from intake to pharmacy against those rules, and explains why semaglutide and tirzepatide, which are not controlled substances, are easier to prescribe online than testosterone, which is.

Since 2008 the Ryan Haight Act has required at least one in-person medical evaluation before a clinician may prescribe a controlled substance remotely. A DEA and HHS rule has suspended that requirement without a break since 2020, most recently through a fourth temporary extension effective January 1, 2026 through December 31, 2026, under which a DEA-registered practitioner may prescribe Schedule II to V medications over audio-video telemedicine with no prior in-person visit. Testosterone is Schedule III and amphetamine is Schedule II, so online TRT and ADHD prescriptions depend on that rule and on what replaces it. What an online prescriber can legally prescribe you reads the Federal Register notice and the statute it suspends.

Four things, all of which the directory prints for each program: the legal entity behind the site (a program that does not disclose one is not listed as qualifying), the medication price separate from the membership fee, whether the medication is the FDA-approved product or a compounded copy, and how the prescriber evaluates you. On the last point, what the FDA says about compounded GLP-1s matters: compounded semaglutide and tirzepatide are not FDA-approved, the FDA does not review them for safety, effectiveness or quality before they are marketed, and since September 9, 2025 the agency has sent telehealth companies 113 warning letters over how they market compounded GLP-1s. That total is our count of three FDA rounds (58, 30 and 25 letters); the FDA publishes the letters individually and states no running total. Where we have a commercial relationship with a program, the page says so and the vetting record is public.