The Therapeutic Goods Administration has announced a new crackdown on how the cosmetic injectables industry advertises its services, saying it protects patients from dodgy practitioners. But the industry says the changes effectively ban any kind of promotion of services, and mean patients won't be able to make informed decisions about their own care.
Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:00 These changes are all around how services are promoted in the cosmetics injectables
00:07 industry. At the moment, the rules state that service practitioners cannot advertise any
00:13 specific medicines. That includes things like Botox. But the workaround for that has been
00:19 to advertise in generic or colloquial terms. So things like anti-wrinkle treatments, for
00:24 example. Under the new rules, practitioners will not even be able to use that kind of
00:30 language around the services they provide. Now, all of this comes at a time when the
00:34 cosmetics injectables industry is booming. It's estimated Australians spend about $1
00:40 billion a year on non-surgical cosmetic procedures, and that's expected to increase up to 20%
00:47 year on year. Australian medical practitioners, we are well-trained, we're well-educated,
00:53 we're all very ethical, so they're not going to be able to get that information from us
00:57 anymore. And even if someone was to, say, approach my business through a social platform,
01:02 I basically have to say, "Sorry, I can't tell you." So it all just kind of looks a little
01:06 bit sneaky. We're not able to be transparent anymore. We're not able to educate properly.
01:13 It's all about how to regulate this booming sector. The Australian Health Practitioners
01:18 Regulatory Agency, or APRA, currently has a hotline to dob in dodgy practitioners. It's
01:25 been operating for about 18 months and has 600 complaints so far, leading to about 14
01:32 practitioners being banned from providing any kind of surgical injectable services.
01:39 Jason McIsa from APRA does say that things like social media make it a lot easier to
01:47 downplay the risks of these services. The challenges of the cosmetic industry is
01:51 really commercialised medicine, and social media makes things look really simple. But
01:56 yeah, cosmetic surgery and cosmetic procedures, they're not like a haircut. A bad haircut
02:00 will grow out, but cosmetic surgery and procedures have risks that might not be so easy to fix.
02:06 APRA currently has a public consultation open for members of the public as well as practitioners
02:12 about how new guidelines can look when it comes to patient safety.
02:15 [BLANK_AUDIO]