State board pulls license of retired physician Blue Hill doctor accused of prescribing via Internet

A retired Blue Hill physician has had her license to practice medicine in Maine suspended for violating the state licensing board’s policy on prescribing medicine over the Internet.

On Tuesday, an administrator at the licensing board said the board acted out of concern for patient safety, but 76-year-old Dr. Virginia Biddle, a retired internist and family practitioner, called the decision “completely unfair” and said she will appeal.

Randall Manning, executive director of the Board of Licensure in Medicine in Maine, said the board filed a complaint against Biddle in July based on reports from confidential sources. He said the board was concerned the physician, who retired from her practice in Ellsworth about two years ago, was prescribing medicine for patients she had never met or even spoken with.

“Without the patient being seen, it’s impossible to make a diagnosis,” Manning said. Patients could receive inappropriate medications due to deliberate or unintentional misrepresentation of their medical problems, he said.

Manning said Biddle’s license was pulled for “writing prescriptions without establishing an appropriate doctor-patient relationship.” The physician has been writing “hundreds of prescriptions a week,” he said.

The board’s policy on Internet prescribing states: “It is the policy of the Board of Licensure in Medicine that prescribing, dispensing or furnishing a prescription medication or device to a person who is not an established patient and whom the physician has not personally examined may be unprofessional conduct subject to disciplinary action.”

The section goes on: “…it is the expectation of the Board that e-mail and other electronic communications and interactions between the physician and the patient should supplement and enhance, but not replace, crucial interpersonal interactions, which create the very basis of the physician-patient relationship.”

Reached at her home, Biddle denied she has been prescribing inappropriately. Rather than writing Internet prescriptions herself, she said, she simply has been countersigning prescriptions for people who want to save money by purchasing their medications from Canadian pharmacies. Most of the prescriptions are written by American physicians for American patients, she said, and then mailed or faxed to Canadian pharmacies to be filled.

“All of these people have been seen by a doctor recently,” she said.

Because Canadian law requires every prescription to have the signature of a physician licensed in Canada before it can be filled, some pharmacies have contracted with a “middle man” company, Biddle explained. Those companies recruit American doctors with Canadian licenses to sign off on prescriptions via fax or e-mail. Biddle said she was recruited about two years ago, via an unsolicited fax message, by Business Services Inc. in North Carolina. She is paid about $1 for each prescription she countersigns, she said.

Martin York, whom Biddle referred to as her boss at Business Services, wouldn’t comment for this story.

“This whole issue [of electronic prescribing] is treated differently in every state,” Biddle said. “Some states, like Massachusetts, sanction and enable the ordering of drugs from Canada. Maine has trouble sorting out how they think and feel about it.”

Biddle said she was licensed in Canada about four years ago so she could write prescriptions for her own patients.

While Manning said the state began its investigation in July, the suspension of Biddle’s license coincided with Tuesday’s episode of “Inside Edition” on NBC, in which she is named in connection with writing Internet prescriptions for Tamiflu. American public health officials have limited access to the anti-viral medication thought to be effective against avian flu. The news program explored how easy it is to get Tamiflu despite the efforts to stockpile the drug in case it’s needed for an anticipated outbreak of the deadly disease.

An Inside Edition staff member was able to acquire a prescription for Tamiflu from the Internet site www.pharmacyboutique.com without seeing a doctor. The medication was reportedly shipped from a pharmacy in “northern Maine” at a cost 60 percent above regular retail. The prescribing physician was identified as Dr. Biddle.

Biddle said earlier Tuesday she had been contacted recently by a “pushy” reporter from the show and essentially refused to comment. She insisted that “almost none” of the prescriptions she countersigned were for Tamiflu.

She also denied ever writing a prescription for any narcotics. Most of the prescriptions have been for chronic conditions such as high blood pressure, diabetes and arthritis, she said.

Biddle said she will appeal the licensing board’s decision. Though she has only been licensed in Canada for four years, she has been licensed in Maine since 1988 and practiced for many years in Ellsworth.

“I don’t want to lose my Maine license this way,” she said.