Medical Malpractice Case of the Month
October 2001

The Illinois Professional Regulation Department temporarily suspended the license of a physician who prescribed the anti-impotence drug Viagra over the Internet to patients he had never seen or examined, but reinstated it May 19 when the physician agreed to stop the practice and pay a $1,000 fine. The board stated that the doctor wrote prescriptions without ever seeing, or even talking to, the patients. The physician was a consultant for a web site at which the patients filled out a one-page form and sent it to the site in exchange for a prescription. Although the physician maintained that he asked questions about complicating conditions, such as heart disease, and asserted that he would never prescribe Viagra if he thought it would endanger a patient's life or health, officials observed that it would be impossible to tell whether an online patient was telling the truth when filling out the form.

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