In today’s video, I’ll help you understand potential exposure to the legal and regulatory quagmire of FDA and FTC false advertising liability.

Hi, I’m Michael H. Cohen, founding attorney of the Cohen Healthcare Law Group. We help healthcare industry clients like you navigate complicated healthcare and FDA legal issues so you can launch, or continue to scale your health and wellness product or service.

In a recent video, I gave an alternative title for this talk, which is: How NOT to Get Slammed Against the Regulatory Mat by FDA, FTC, & Other Alphabet Soup-Letter Agencies, Federal & State, as well as Private Plaintiffs.

Now, you don’t really love it but false advertising does show up everywhere, so you got to know it.  Just this month, FTC sent Letters to lots and lots of Different Companies to Stop Making Unsupported Claims, That Their Products & Therapies Effectively Prevent or Treat COVID-19.

This included: claiming their acupuncture procedures prevented or treated coronavirus; claiming their cold and flu treatments were effective against COVID-19; claiming that their homeopathic herbal remedies could treat and prevent coronavirus. And so on, you get the idea.

These are just a few of the examples, but the gist of it is, it seems a lot of people these days want to claim that something prevents or cures the coronavirus or some other disease, and that’s trouble.

FTC is being especially active about protecting consumers from for COVID-19 claims, because FTC knows that unscrupulous marketers will try to take advantage of the public. And FTC is proactive in many other areas.  In fact, FTC’s mandate is to regulate false advertising, period.

This means FTC can slam you or your business or your client’s business against the mat for mistakes you might not even know you’re making in your marketing.

When I slam, I mean penalties in the tens of millions of dollars, and possibly criminal liability for the principals. Typically, since our law firm focuses on the healthcare industry, we review marketing claims in three industries in particular: dietary supplements; cosmetics; and medical devices.  But, we also deal with consumer products that touch on health and wellness.

For example, we represented the manufacturer of a mattress who wanted to make claims about the product’s ability to help people, not only to sleep better, but deal with insomnia. That’s a different area of claim.

Now that you understand the breadth of FTC’s reach, what is false advertising?  The Federal Trade Commission Act prohibits “unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce.”  Companies must be able to substantiate their claims, meaning they must have a “reasonable basis” for every claim.  For healthcare products there is a higher standard, which is that the claim must be supported by “competent and reliable scientific evidence.”

Please, have all your claims reviewed by an attorney who understands your exposure to FDA and FTC.  This is serious exposure, and it’s good to have legal review as a precaution.

Thanks for watching. When you have questions, click on the link below, cohenhealthcarelaw.com/contact, to send us a message or book an appointment. Here’s to the success of your healthcare venture, we look forward to working with you soon.