The Dark Side of Healthcare Online

The first part of the healthcare system to proliferate online was also its most dangerous: online pharmacies. Around for almost a decade now, online pharmacies, operating primarily overseas, provide prescription drugs illegally across international borders. Not surprisingly, the rise in online pharmacies has also corresponded to an 80% rise in pharmaceutical drug abuse in the US from 2000-2006, particularly among teens.

I was curious how difficult it really was to find or use these pharmacies, but a quick online search turned up the pharmacy shown below. This pharmacy offered one of the most abused pharmaceutical narcotics, oxycontin, shipped without a prescription. Obviously this is illegal, but apparently the US government has political difficultly in disallowing these altogether because of the number of senior citizens saving money buying their drugs online.

Clearly there are real benefits to being able to fill prescriptions from home, but since the DEA appears to be having difficulty enforcing prescription laws, these pharmacies represent more harm than good. We like to think about all of the potential benefits of telemedicine, but it may be instructive to think about the dangers of the online medical system already in place to help us design safer online health delivery services. An online doctor's visit could easily become another way for addicts to obtain prescriptions while circumventing the system's safeguards.