Ask who makes and sends it
For someone receiving care online, the medicine maker’s identity may be unclear, notes the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Compounding involves preparing a product to order in place of a ready-made medicine.
Ask for the pharmacy’s full name, then ask whether it prepares the medicine or only sends it.
Keep that answer with the exact product name.
Look inside the source drawer
Get the name of the pharmacy or medicine maker that prepared your medicine so you can check its licence.
Look for the New York registration
For pharmacies based outside New York, shipping prescriptions to the state’s residents generally requires New York registration as of September 2026.
It also needs a licence or registration in its home state.
New York may grant an exception for an out-of-state pharmacy sending no more than 600 prescriptions into New York in a calendar year.
That limit concerns all its prescriptions sent into the state, rather than just the one it sends to you.
If the pharmacy claims an exception, ask it to explain how New York’s rule applies to it.
Look inside the source drawer
Registered pharmacies can be checked through New York’s Office of the Professions search.
FDA registration is a different thing
An ‘outsourcing facility’ is a medicine maker that chooses to register with FDA to prepare batches of medicines free of living germs.
Unlike an ordinary pharmacy making medicine for you, it can make batches without prescriptions naming each patient.
These facilities must follow federal factory-quality rules and are inspected by FDA.
As of September 2026, registration gives no FDA approval to either the facility or its medicines.
The FDA keeps a public list of registered facilities.
Look inside the source drawer
This registration shows that the maker chose the federal rules for preparing these batches; it is not an FDA recommendation of the business.
A label can need checking too
Depending on the product, medicines containing semaglutide or tirzepatide treat diabetes or help with weight management.
In September 2026, FDA described fake made-to-order semaglutide and tirzepatide with made-up pharmacy names on their labels.
It also describes labels using the name of a real pharmacy that did not prepare the product.
The state search checks whether the named pharmacy is registered; asking that pharmacy about the bottle checks whether it really prepared it.
Look inside the source drawer
A label can give a made-up pharmacy name or use a real pharmacy’s name without its involvement.