Should authorities tighten advertisement regulations on health products?
Should the authorities do more to tighten the rules on advertisements of products and services, especially those relating to health?
This question was raised following a blog post by Dr John Lim, CEO of the Health Sciences Authority earlier this week.
In his online post titled "Is there a quick fix?", Dr Lim asked
consumers to be more discerning when they see aggressive promotion of
health supplements, as quite often such claims are false.
Claire Huang reports.
Loose terms like "100 per cent safe" and "scientifically proven" are commonly used in advertisements of health supplements.
But are they accurate?
According to Dr John Lim, the descriptions are misleading.
But the current regulatory system does not require checks on advertisements of such products.
In Singapore, advertisements of consumer goods, including health
supplements, have to get prior approval from the Advertising Standards
Authority of Singapore.
But as Dr Tan Tze Wee, Vice-Chairperson of the ASAS explains, the body only serves as a watchdog.
"At the end of the day, ASAS is not an enforcement agency, it's a
self-regulatory agency. We depend on the feedback of the public as well
as from our Secretariat and other agencies to tell us what's going on
in the marketplace and we go ahead and act on them."
Dr Tan adds that while there's currently no pre-approval of ads by
officials on the various health supplements, health authorities do
check for the safety of a product.
But there's scope to do more....
"I think safety and quality itself is something that they look
at, but relating to what they can do and claims like that, is something
perhaps the health authorities could in the future look into some ways
of enforcing regulations to govern health supplements."
Over the last three years, authorities received 16 complaints over misleading ads for health products.
The number may be small, but still some consumers feel there should be tighter checks on such advertisements.
Mr Siow Jiarui, a lawyer, thinks it's time for a review of the current regulatory system.
"Current regulating bodies should be given more teeth to
ensure that such claims are not bandit about by the advertisers and
instead of merely removing the advertisement that's misleading, there
should be greater sanctions if the need calls for it."
Like Dr Lim, Mr Siow thinks that consumers, on their part, must exercise a healthy dose of skepticism when reading ads.
"A red flag will come up if I see an ad that says "100 per
cent success or guarantee" because it's quite impossible to believe
that any product can work the same way for every consumer."
--938Live