The Rise of Telehealth 'Pill Mills'

The elderly patient’s blood pressure had been dropping for weeks, and Chad Wittekind, his primary care provider, couldn’t figure out what was wrong. He had upped the dosage of one medication and added another, but couldn’t manage to regulate it. The patient hadn’t reported taking any other new medications or supplements and hadn’t made any major recent lifestyle changes. So what could be causing the blood pressure irregularity? It took a lot of questions and appointments to find the culprit: a drug he’d gotten through a telehealth website.Like many other patients Wittekind has seen recently, this one had circumvented his primary care provider to get a drug over the Internet—in this case, an erectile-dysfunction medication. He’d gone to a website he came across online, filled out a form that a virtual health care provider quickly reviewed, and was sent the medication through the mail, but had been too embarrassed to tell Wittekind about the new addition to his regimen. You might not think that Wittekind, a Columbus, Ohio-based provider who works in geriatrics, would be seeing many patients turn to the Internet to get drugs for conditions like erectile dysfunction, overweight, menopa...