I was sitting in a meeting once, many years into my legal career, watching a very confident practitioner explain to a regulator why a particular Instagram post was “just vibes.”
I remember thinking two things simultaneously. First, that “just vibes” was never going to land well as a compliance defence, I’m pretty sure Dennis Denuto attempted to rest his case on similar wording. Second, that this person had absolutely no idea they had been walking a tightrope for the better part of eighteen months. They were not reckless. They were not careless. They had simply never been told that the rope existed.
That meeting has stayed with me. Partly because of what happened next, which I will not detail here for reasons that should be obvious. Mostly because I have seen versions of it play out more times than I can count, in different rooms, with different practitioners, all of them talented, all of them genuinely trying to do the right thing, and none of them adequately warned about where the lines were.
So consider this me, warning you. With affection. And a mild sense of urgency.
Here is the thing nobody tells you when you open a cosmetic medicine clinic or commence your IV/peptide side hustle. You are not just a healthcare provider. You are also, whether you wanted to be or not, a media company. You have a website. You have a booking page. You have social media platforms. You have a link-in-bio landing page that someone on your team built at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday night and which has been quietly sitting on the public internet ever since, saying things you have possibly never fully read back.
All of it advertises. All of it is regulated. And all of it is discoverable on a bad day.
The shift happened gradually and then suddenly, the way these things always do. Advertising compliance went from being a distant cousin of proper paperwork to being, genuinely, a business risk with teeth. There are civil penalties under the Therapeutic Goods Act for advertising that does not comply with the Therapeutic Goods Advertising Code. There are consumer law exposure points under the Australian Consumer Law for content that misleads or creates false impressions about the nature, characteristics, or suitability of services. And your business involves registered health practitioners, so advertising risk does not stay safely in the corporate column. It can become personal. As in, your registration. As in, you.
One Instagram carousel. Three simultaneous legal frameworks. Good morning.
I want to tell you about the myths, because I have heard all of them, and I say this without judgment because I have heard them from genuinely excellent practitioners who simply did not know what they did not know.
“We don’t use brand names, so we’re fine.” Brand names are not the only trigger. A “top-up.” A “tweak.” A “freshen.” A reel of someone looking suspiciously radiant with a caption about “no downtime.” In a regulated setting, implication is a statement. The wink counts.
“It’s educational, not promotional.” I love this one. I love it because the person saying it usually believes it completely. Education becomes promotion the moment it steers someone toward a treatment. The line is genuinely not always obvious. Which is precisely why it is a risk.
“Our agency handles all that.” One that is used prolifically. I say this gently: your agency cannot inherit your liability. If your clinic publishes it, your clinic owns it. Your agency can make it look beautiful. That is a different service.
And my personal favourite: “Everyone else does it.” Makes me think of my mother when I used it as a child: “Yes, and if everyone else was jumping into a fire would you do it too?” was her typical response. Compliance is not a popularity contest. It is a paper trail waiting to happen.
So what does “be compliant” actually look like on a Monday morning, in a real clinic, with a full list and seventeen unread messages?
It looks like having someone who signs off on content before it goes live, based on something more rigorous than a feeling. It looks like knowing which words are off-limits, not because you have memorised the legislation, but because someone has translated it into a list a human being can actually use. It looks like keeping a record of decisions, what changed, why, who approved it. Not because regulators are lurking behind every Instagram story, but because “I had a process” is a defensible position and “we just kind of posted things” is not.
It looks like watching your “outcome energy.” The law does not love certainty, and medicine should not either. “Guaranteed results.” “Safe for everyone.” “One appointment fixes it.” These are the phrases that sound like good marketing and read like an enforcement invitation. The overall impression your content creates is what matters. If it tells a story that no honest clinician could guarantee, that is the story a regulator will read.
I want to leave you with three questions. Not to alarm you. To orient you.
Could a reasonable person read your website and form the view that a specific outcome is likely, before any consultation, based purely on how your content is written?
Do your socials imply predictability or typical results without meaningful context?
Have you ever used urgency or discounting in a way that felt more like a furniture sale than a healthcare decision?
If any of those landed, that is not a moral failing. It is an extremely common feature of operating in an industry where the marketing norms and the regulatory obligations have never been properly reconciled for most practitioners. The gap is real. It is also fixable.
The difference between the clinics that weather regulatory scrutiny and the ones that do not is rarely perfection. It is almost always systems. Boring, unglamorous, functional systems.
Creativity does not die in compliance. It just learns to stay on the right side of the line, which turns out to be entirely achievable with the right guidance and significantly less terrifying than the alternative.
The practitioners already doing good work deserve to keep doing it, without one enthusiastic caption undoing all of it.
That is why I built CosmediComply. And if the “just vibes” meeting taught me anything, it is that this conversation is long overdue. Make sure you download our free advertising checklist to help you with your clinic advertising audit.
Nadine
General information only. Not legal advice and not a substitute for advice tailored to your specific clinic, practitioner mix, and advertising channels.
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