they go all the way around the planet and you'll find ron heinz. he is a retired physically disabled texas licensed veterinarian with a ph.d. in biology. he spent his career working with exotic animals at a research facility here in maryland. he worked at sea world. he was in private practice. he's just an amazing veterinarian who, after he retired, because his disabilities made it impossible for him to continue to work, he still wanted to help animals. so one day, he and the missionaries in rural nigeria start writing e-mails to each other about what to do about the cat. how should we feed the cat? how can we make sure this cat stays healthy? what are the things we should looking out for? ron and the missionaries are exchanging e-mails. ron starts doing this with other people too, mostly for free, although occasionally he would charge people a flat fee of a couple of bucks, just to help him cover the cost of keeping his website going. he never made any money doing it. what has just transpired? a disabled 70-year-old man in texas writes an e-mail t

so ron heinz one of the things he did is people would write him and say "i have been to two differenthey've given me two different diagnosis and can you look at the file, help me make a decision?" because i have to make a decision and ron is the kind of person who has a great deal of experience and can help out. with respect to people in rural areas, one of the things that ron got in trouble for is that there was an impoverished double amputee in maine who was living by himself and the only thing he had was his beloved dog and his dog was sick and his dog was dying and ron was talking this guy through certain things to help alleviate his dog's suffering and eventually ron found a veterinarian in maine who would treat the dog for free for this amputee and another veterinarian heard about that that ron heinz in texas has been providing some initial hope the this over the phone and reported ron heinz for doing that. and this is, like cure economic protectionism. no rational person would say that this impoverished double amputee who's not going to a veterinarian who's getting some free he

rule and the simple rule is the doctor has to exercise professional judgment and so for example in ron heinz's case, if the animal actually -- let's say he examines an animal. he is legally authorized to euthanize the animal, he can amputate a limb, perform surgery, provide powerful drugs based on his exercise of professional judgment. that's what being a texas licensed veterinarian means. and there are plenty of intook places in which we would talk to somebody via the internet and he would say "you know what? you're presenting questions and i can't actually give you good advice because it seems to me the nature of your problem isn't amenable to a telemedicine solution. so you have to go see a vet." so rather than think well we have to enumerate every conceivable permutation of the doctor/patient relationship in order to regulate it, what we should say is "when you have past the threshold requirement of actually bag doctor and we have invested in you the authority to exercise your professional judgment, then engaging in responsible telemedicine is just an extension of that authority." and that