The State Board of Medicine in my home state recently sent out a bulletin about the practice of “friendly prescribing” to people who the practitioner has not examined.  For example, a friend might call me and say something like “I have a sore throat.  Will you call me in a prescription for antibiotics?”  I’m sure that almost everyone who has practiced medicine has received such phone calls!  The Board of Medicine was concerned about this. They went so far as to to condemn as unethical the practice of issuing such prescriptions without ever examining the patient or documenting the encounter.

In my opinion, this applies to correctional physicians prescribing to new inmates they have never seen, as well.