[In response to “Feel Like a Criminal? Compact to the Rescue,” April 2015]

My own experience with licensing authorities in two states highlights the incomprehensibility of state medical boards’ rules sometimes.

1. When I left Texas in 2007 after eight years of being licensed there, which required original-source notarized documentation, and then considered a return to Texas, I was told by TSBME [the Texas State Board of Medical Examiners] that I would have to redo the entire process, including the original documents that Texas had itself used in 1999 to license me there to begin with! I asked the TSBME if that means that they don’t trust their own process for initial and ongoing licensure, valid through my departure in 2007. The response was, “The rules are the rules!”
2. When I considered moving to Tennessee recently, the Tennessee State Board told me that, because I had done a fellowship 26 years ago in Tennessee, I would have to provide 26 years’ worth of documentation of my CME activity, and pay 26 years’ worth of licensing fees, to get re-licensed in Tennessee. I told the Tennessee Board that since these items would not have been required if I had never set foot inside Tennessee to begin with, their policy makes no sense—to require less documentation because I had never previously been there! Response? None … complete silence and lack of response.

—John G. Boulet, MD
Huntsville, Alabama