The Silencing of Qualified Voices: Why the people most equipped to advise you are the ones legally barred from doing so.

By Courtney Oar & Miranda Chan

Open Instagram on any given day and you will find someone with no clinical training confidently telling their followers which prescription-only weight loss injection "changed their life," which unregulated peptide "fixed" their hormones, or which supplement stack they swear by for hair regrowth. They speak with total conviction. They have no qualifications, and in most cases, they face no consequences at all.

Now picture a pharmacist trying to do the same thing - even responsibly, even with the evidence to back it up and no financial interest in doing so. That pharmacist cannot legally tell you which prescription medicine worked for them. They cannot recommend a specific brand of a therapeutic product. They cannot even share a glowing patient testimonial, because testimonials for therapeutic goods are prohibited outright. If they get it wrong, the consequences are not a deleted comment or a temporarily paused account. They are regulatory investigation, infringement notices, and potential action against the registration that allows them to practise at all.

This is the contradiction sitting at the centre of health content online, and as clinical pharmacists who built Pretty Proven specifically to cut through wellness misinformation, it is one we live with every single day.

What are we actually allowed to say?

Australia regulates health professionals and therapeutic goods through two separate but overlapping systems, and social media does not get a carve-out from either of them.

Ahpra and the National Boards apply the same standards to a Facebook post as they would to a conversation in clinic. Practitioners are expected to communicate professionally, avoid misleading or deceptive claims, and ensure anything they say is consistent with the best available evidence. Importantly, Ahpra's own guidance acknowledges that registered practitioners will not be investigated purely for holding or expressing views online, and that there is genuine room for advocacy, opinion, and public commentary. However, the moment content shifts from "this is the evidence" into the territory of advertising a specific regulated product or service, a different and far stricter regime takes over.

That regime belongs to the Therapeutic Goods Administration. Under the Therapeutic Goods Act 1989, prescription-only medicines and biologicals are prohibited from being advertised to the public, full stop. The TGA has been explicit that this prohibition applies just as much to a 15-second reel as it does to a billboard, and that it extends to anyone who creates, shares, or manages the content, including the influencers posting it. The TGA's own guidance was updated specifically in response to the explosion of prescription medicines like Ozempic and cosmetic injectables such as Botox being promoted on social media through influencer-style endorsements, nicknames, and hashtags designed to dodge detection. In the most recent financial year, the TGA requested removal of more than 13,700 unlawful advertisements from digital platforms and issued infringement notices worth almost $200,000 to a single telehealth provider for unlawfully advertising prescription weight-loss medicines.

So, a pharmacist with a clinical cancer pharmacy background and a professional registration that can be suspended or cancelled is not permitted to name or recommend a specific prescription therapy, even when their motivation is purely educational and even when every claim they would make is true. Meanwhile, someone with a ring light and zero clinical training can post the same product, often as a paid partnership, and the realistic odds of meaningful regulatory consequence remain comparatively low.

The part we want to be honest about 

Here is where we want to be careful, because this is not a simple story of villains and victims.

We do not believe most health influencers are acting in bad faith. The overwhelming majority are genuinely sharing what worked for them, genuinely trying to help, and genuinely unaware that what feels like an honest recommendation carries a different kind of risk when it reaches tens of thousands of people who do not know their full medical history. Personal experience is real, and it matters to people. We understand why it resonates.

But personal experience is not the same as clinical evidence, and an audience cannot always tell the difference between the two when both are delivered with equal confidence and a well-lit ring light. The TGA's own guidance flags exactly this problem: testimonials for therapeutic goods are prohibited in regulated advertising precisely because one person's outcome is not proof of safety or efficacy for anyone else, and unsubstantiated claims made with total sincerity are still unsubstantiated claims.

The financial relationship is where it gets genuinely uncomfortable. When an influencer has a paid partnership, an affiliate code, or equity in the brand they are recommending, that is a direct financial interest in the outcome of their advice. For a health professional, that same arrangement would be an unambiguous conflict of interest, the kind we are trained from our very first year of practice to disclose or avoid entirely. The regulatory framework requires that paid endorsements be disclosed, but disclosure is inconsistently enforced and, in our observation, frequently buried, vague, or skipped altogether. The asymmetry is stark: we operate under a system built to manage conflicts of interest, while parts of the influencer economy operate on commission structures with comparatively little independent oversight of whether the underlying claims are even true.

Why this matters beyond professional frustration 

It would be easy to frame this purely as an annoyance for practitioners. It’s not. It’s a public safety issue.

When the most qualified voices are the most constrained, and the least qualified voices face the fewest consequences, the information environment tilts toward whoever is willing to say the most confident thing, not whoever is most likely to be right. People making decisions about prescription weight-loss medication, cosmetic injectables, or unregulated peptides deserve access to people who actually understand pharmacology, contraindications, and the difference between an anecdote and an evidence base. Right now, the system makes that access disproportionately hard to get.

What needs to change 

We are not arguing that health professionals should be free to advertise prescription medicines on social media. That prohibition exists for good reason, and we support the principle behind it. What we are arguing for is a system that recognises the difference between advertising and education, and that applies its scrutiny in proportion to actual risk rather than to who happens to hold a registration.

A genuinely safer information environment would involve closer alignment and faster, better-resourced enforcement between Ahpra and the TGA specifically targeting unregistered influencer advertising of prescription and high-risk products, not just registered practitioners who are already the most cautious and most heavily scrutinised group online. It would involve consistent, enforced disclosure standards for paid health content regardless of who is posting it. And it would involve clearer public guidance that helps consumers tell the difference between a credentialed clinical opinion and a sponsored personal anecdote, so the burden of figuring that out does not sit entirely on the consumer.

The part we need to own

But we also think it would be dishonest to put this entirely on the system. Health professionals, including us, need to reflect on why people are turning to influencers in the first place.

The honest answer is that influencer content is often more relatable, more emotionally honest, and more human than what the traditional healthcare system offers. A reel about someone's real, messy experience with a treatment lands differently to a clinical handout. People are not choosing influencers over health professionals because they think a content creator knows more about pharmacology. They are choosing them because the delivery feels personal, and ours often does not.

That is on us to fix, within the bounds of what we are legally allowed to do. It means communicating with warmth instead of authority for its own sake. It means being transparent about what we can and cannot say, and explaining why, rather than retreating into vague caution that reads as evasive. It means showing up as real people with real stories, the way we try to do at Pretty Proven, while still being absolutely clear that we have no products to sell and no sponsorships clouding what we tell you.

The system that constrains us exists to protect the public, and broadly, it should. However, a system that makes the most qualified people the hardest to hear is not actually serving the goal it was built for. Closing that gap will take regulatory reform. It will also take us, as health professionals, getting better at being human.

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Pretty Proven was founded by clinical pharmacists Miranda Chan and Courtney Oar to deliver evidence-based, unbiased health information for women, free from sponsorship and free from products to sell. Informed. Assured. Empowered.