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