What We Can and Cannot Verify

Every site that ranks sellers tells you what it knows. This is the other half: what we cannot check, what we get wrong, and what we found wrong in our own pages this week. If you are going to rely on a register, you should know where its edges are.

Five things we published that were wrong

All five were live. All five have been corrected, and each now has an automated check that fails our build if it recurs.

1. Four sellers were credited with FDA warning letters they do not have — four, five and six of them. The count was built from a field that also stored general FDA notes, so boilerplate about compounded drugs not being FDA-approved was counted as enforcement history. Written up here.
2. One seller’s review said it “carries a LegitScript certification” while the body of the same page said the certification was absent. The flag searched the whole record for the word, so a note saying a seal was missing counted as proof one existed. Written up here.
3. One seller was publicly criticized for charging “273% above the register median for compounded semaglutide” when the price in question was brand Ozempic, quoted verbatim from its own site in our notes. Written up here.
4. Eleven sellers offered a molecule the FDA says cannot lawfully be compounded, and three had it written up as a selling point — a “broad GLP-1 menu”. Written up here.
5. Two public filters were labeled “LegitScript verified only”, asserting a verification we have never performed on a single record.

Four of those five errors ran against a seller. One ran in favor of one. Errors do not distribute politely.

What we cannot verify at all

Some limits are not fixable by being more careful. They are structural, and pretending otherwise would be the bigger failure.

How the errors were found

Not by review. Every one surfaced while writing an article that needed a number — counting sellers offering a molecule, computing a price spread, checking who claims a badge. The act of publishing a figure is what exposed the figure being wrong.

That is worth saying because it suggests the errors still in here will be found the same way, by someone computing something. It also means the parts of the register nobody has needed a number from are the parts least likely to have been checked.

What you should do with any register, including this one

• Check the date on anything that moves. Prices and terms change faster than any register updates.
• Treat an absence as an absence. “No FDA letter on record” means we searched a register, not that nothing exists anywhere.
• Verify anything that would change your decision. A badge, a price, a state list — the checks take minutes, and we publish how to do them.
• Tell us when we are wrong. Every correction above came from the inside, which is the least reliable way for it to happen.

Our corrections page lists changes we have made, and the methodology page sets out how scores are computed. Neither is interesting reading. Both are more useful than a ranking.