If you advertise a health service in Australia, and a website absolutely counts as advertising, you are working under section 133 of the Health Practitioner Regulation National Law, plus guidelines the National Boards publish under section 39. The current edition of those guidelines has applied since 14 December 2020, and AHPRA's advertising hub is the living reference around it. None of it is unreasonable. Almost all of it is regularly broken by accident, usually by a well-meaning marketer who never read it.
The five things section 133 prohibits
The section itself is short. Advertising a regulated health service must not:
- Be false, misleading or deceptive, or likely to be. This limb does most of the enforcement work: inaccurate claims, missing risk information, prices that show only part of the cost, or comparisons you cannot back with evidence all land here.
- Offer a gift, discount or other inducement without stating the terms and conditions of the offer in the advertisement itself.
- Use testimonials or purported testimonials about the service or business. More on this below, because it is the most misunderstood rule in the set.
- Create an unreasonable expectation of beneficial treatment. Promises of outcomes, perfect results or universally gentle experiences live here.
- Directly or indirectly encourage indiscriminate or unnecessary use of health services. Urgency theatre, and check-up reminders with no clinical basis, are the classic traps.
Testimonials: what the rule actually says
The testimonial rule is not 'reviews are banned'. It is narrower and, once you see the shape of it, easy to work with. A testimonial, for the purposes of the ban, is a positive statement about the clinical aspects of care: the symptom someone came in with, the diagnosis or treatment they received, the outcome they got, or the practitioner's skill. The ban is on using such statements in your advertising.
| Question | If yes |
|---|---|
| Is the statement about a regulated health service? | Continue to the next question |
| Is it being used in advertising you control: your website, your socials, your ads, or something you link to or re-share? | Continue to the next question |
| Does it refer to a clinical aspect: symptom, diagnosis, treatment, outcome or the practitioner's skill? | All three yes: it is a prohibited testimonial |
Three practical consequences follow. First, patients can review you anywhere they like, including Google, and you are not required to hunt those reviews down; AHPRA says so explicitly. Second, what you cannot do is fold those reviews into your own advertising: pasting them onto your website, linking to them, re-sharing a patient's post, or even liking and replying to a clinical-aspect review can count as 'use'. Third, comments that are genuinely non-clinical, like praise for friendly reception staff or easy parking, are not testimonials and may be published, but if you publish reviews at all they must be complete and unedited, because cherry-picking the nice sentences is misleading conduct in its own right.
Protected titles, and the specialist trap
Under the National Law, only three professions have specialist registration: medicine, dentistry and podiatry. A physiotherapist, chiropractor, psychologist or nurse cannot be called a specialist in advertising, and AHPRA treats 'specialises in', 'specialty' and 'specialised' exactly the same way. Its suggested alternatives are honest and workable: 'substantial experience in' or 'working primarily in'. A descriptive focus like 'sports chiropractor' is acceptable because it names a focus area rather than implying a registration category.
Two related wrinkles are worth knowing. Some professions have college-awarded titles, and AHPRA's position is that any reference must spell out the award in full, for example a titled musculoskeletal physiotherapist naming the awarding college and year, rather than the bare word. And since the 2023 amendments, the title 'surgeon', including 'cosmetic surgeon', is restricted under section 115A to medical practitioners with specialist registration in surgery, obstetrics and gynaecology, or ophthalmology. Dentists using the long-standing title 'dental surgeon' are unaffected. Misusing protected titles is an offence under sections 113 to 119, and it is the category of breach that can carry imprisonment.
The prescription-medicine rule most clinics have wrong
The Therapeutic Goods Act 1989 prohibits advertising prescription-only medicines to the public. Everyone in cosmetic health knows the brand names are off limits. The part that changed under current guidance is this: the Therapeutic Goods Administration now explicitly treats generic substitute phrases as prohibited indirect references too. Its 2026 guidance names phrases such as 'wrinkle reduction injections' and 'weight-loss injections' as examples, and for social content it flags nicknames, acronyms and hashtags the same way. The industry's favourite workaround wording is, on the current guidance, not a workaround at all.
The compliant approach the guidance points to is to advertise the consultation and the service, not the substance or its effects: who you are, the area of practice, and an invitation to book a consultation where treatment options can be discussed individually. It is a genuinely tighter constraint on cosmetic marketing than most practices realise, it also applies to your Google Ads, where Australia-targeted ads cannot use prescription drug terms in the ad or its destination, and it is precisely the kind of detail worth getting right before a competitor reports you. Complaints are, in practice, how a lot of enforcement starts.
Images, offers and urgency
- Before-and-after photos must be genuine, unedited, comparably lit and framed, and must not make the 'after' the star of the show. AHPRA's cosmetic-procedure guidelines add that the ad should say how long after treatment the second image was taken, carry a prominent results-vary disclaimer, and rest on specific, revocable patient consent for advertising use.
- Offers and discounts are permitted if the full terms are stated clearly in the same advertisement. A bare asterisk pointing nowhere is where practices get caught.
- Urgency and scarcity framing, the 'act now before it's too late' family, risks the indiscriminate-use limb when tied to a health outcome. Health decisions are not flash sales, and the law is written accordingly.
- Prices must be complete and honest: the total cost, not a teaser component of it.
Who is responsible when someone else wrote it
Control is the test. If you publish, authorise or can edit content, you are responsible for it, which covers your website, your social pages and everything an agency or staff member produces on your behalf. On platforms you genuinely do not control, responsibility for the reviews function sits with the platform, though anything you do control on that platform is still yours. This is also why engaging an influencer does not outsource your risk: both AHPRA and the TGA say responsibility can attach to the clinic and the creator at once.
- A thirty-minute self-audit for your current website
- Search your site for review quotes, star widgets and 'testimonials' pagesAnything describing symptoms, treatment or outcomes has to come down
- Check every use of 'specialist', 'specialising' and 'specialised'Unless the practitioner holds specialist registration, reword to 'substantial experience in'
- Look for medicine references on cosmetic pages, including the generic phrasingsAdvertise the consultation, not the injectable class
- Read every offer for stated terms and conditionsIn the ad itself, not on request
- Reread outcome language for promisesGentle intentions are fine; guaranteed results are not
- Check your team page titles against registrationsIncluding 'surgeon', and 'Dr' used without naming the profession
The questions practices actually ask us
Do we have to delete our Google reviews?
No, and you could not anyway. Reviews patients leave on platforms you do not control are their speech, not your advertising, and AHPRA says plainly that the rules do not restrict patients posting them. Your obligations start when you use those reviews: quoting them on your site, linking to them, or interacting with clinical ones from your practice account.
Can we ask patients for reviews?
Inviting genuine feedback is generally workable; the sharp edges are incentives and selection. Under Australian Consumer Law guidance, an incentive risks being misleading unless it is offered regardless of whether the review is positive or negative and is disclosed, and steering only happy patients toward the review link misrepresents the overall picture. Keep invitations neutral, and never republish the clinical ones in your own marketing.
Our agency wrote it. Are we still liable?
Yes. AHPRA's guidance is explicit that advertisers are responsible for content produced on their behalf, and the penalties attach to the person or entity advertising the service. Which is an excellent reason to work with marketers who can explain these rules without googling them mid-call.
Is 'Dr' allowed for non-medical practitioners?
The word itself is not a protected title, but AHPRA's guidance says that if a practitioner who is not a medical practitioner uses it, the advertising should state their profession alongside it, for example 'Dr J Smith (dentist)'. Using it bare, in a context where readers would assume a medical degree, risks the misleading limb.
Where do we check something ourselves?
AHPRA's advertising hub is genuinely readable and includes a self-assessment tool for checking your own advertising, and the TGA publishes its guidance on advertising health services in plain language. Both are linked below. For anything with real money or registration risk attached, a short conversation with your indemnity insurer beats a long argument with a regulator.