Pause when an offer skips the checks.

Check what the medicine is.

Compounded means a medicine was made to order, with a pharmacist or doctor preparing it. FDA is short for the US medicines agency, the Food and Drug Administration.

Compounded medicines had no FDA approval as of September 2026. FDA had not reviewed their quality, their safety or how well they worked before patients could get these medicines.

FDA’s advice was to use them only when an approved drug could not meet the patient’s medical need.

Ask why an approved option would not meet your need.

Copying an available drug has limits.

By September 2026, FDA’s national shortage list no longer included semaglutide (Ozempic, Wegovy) injections or tirzepatide (Mounjaro, Zepbound) injections.

As of September 2026, federal law limited repeated copying of an available ready-made medicine by pharmacies filling individual prescriptions. It also limited making very large amounts of those copies.

A change made for one patient can take a medicine outside this copy rule. The prescriber must find an important difference for that patient from the change.

For example, a patient with a dye allergy may need medicine that leaves out that dye.

Paying less, on its own, does not satisfy the rule for such a change.

Adding a vitamin does not by itself make a copy legal. FDA’s September 2026 position still depended on whether the medicine was a copy and whether a change mattered for that patient.

Ask what change is proposed and why it matters for you.

Leave research labels out of the care plan.

FDA’s September 2026 guidance warned against research-labelled products sold for people to use. The quality of these products is not known, and use may lead to harm.

FDA’s September 2026 warnings about unapproved weight-loss drugs named retatrutide and cagrilintide. Neither could legally be made to order under federal law. FDA had not found either safe and effective for any condition.

Ask for the exact drug name and an explanation of its status. A vague word like ‘peptide’ leaves that question open.

Watch for promises and missing names.

FDA flags online offers that skip a health check and a prescription, or leave no doctor available for questions after delivery.

As of September 2026, it was false to say that a compounded product had FDA approval.

FDA registration is a record of a place that makes drugs. A drug may also have a National Drug Code, or NDC: a number identifying it in FDA’s list of drug products. As of September 2026, neither that record nor that number meant FDA approval.

In September 2026, FDA’s public advice described fake compounded-product labels naming pharmacies that did not exist.

Know how to get help.

Before treatment, ask which symptoms call for a same-day response and who will answer. Keep the doctor’s instructions where you can find them.

For a medicine problem, MedWatch is the FDA service where patients can send reports.

A report alone does not prove which medicine caused the problem.