Therapeutic proposal

The government should act promptly on the Supreme Court's call for a mechanism enabling citizens to file complaints against misleading medical advertisements.

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The two-judge Bench of the apex court stated it would issue comprehensive directions for the grievance-redress mechanism shortly. If designed well, such a mechanism could offer genuine agency to consumers of medical products and services and would not come a moment too late. The Advertising Standards Council of India (Asci), a voluntary watchdog for advertising ethics, has suggested that a large chunk of complaints of misleading advertisements is related to health care. In the past three years, the data from the Ministry of Ayush shows 38,539 instances of misleading advertisements were brought to the attention of the state-licensing authorities. To make such a mechanism genuinely effective, however, the government would do well to tighten its rules on medical advertisements further.