The five lines allied health practices cannot cross in their advertising
Section 133 binds every registered allied health practitioner in Australia. The five limbs, the penalties, and what AHPRA actually enforced in 2023/24.
Photo: Juan Manuel Montejano Lopez / Pexels
Most Australian allied health practices do not set out to break advertising law. They set out to fill a diary. They put a five-star Google review on the homepage, run a "first consult half price" campaign in January, and post a patient's thank-you message to Instagram because it was genuinely lovely.
Every one of those three things can breach the same section of the same Act.
Section 133 of the Health Practitioner Regulation National Law binds every practitioner registered with AHPRA, across all 15 National Boards. It is not a guideline and it is not industry best practice. It is an offence provision carrying a maximum penalty of $60,000 for an individual and $120,000 for a body corporate, per offence.
In 2023/24 AHPRA assessed 667 advertising complaints. The year before, it assessed 380.
- Section 133 creates five separate advertising prohibitions, and you only have to cross one
- Testimonials about clinical care are banned outright, with no compliant version
- The maximum penalty is $60,000 per offence for an individual, $120,000 for a body corporate
- Advertising complaints assessed by AHPRA rose from 380 to 667 in a single reporting year
- The rules apply to anyone advertising a regulated health service, including practice owners and marketers who are not registered themselves
What section 133 actually says
This is the operative text, reproduced in full from the Queensland consolidation of the National Law, which is the version other participating jurisdictions adopt.
133 Advertising
(1) A person must not advertise a regulated health service, or a business that provides a regulated health service, in a way that:
(a) is false, misleading or deceptive or is likely to be misleading or deceptive; or
(b) offers a gift, discount or other inducement to attract a person to use the service or the business, unless the advertisement also states the terms and conditions of the offer; or
(c) uses testimonials or purported testimonials about the service or business; or
(d) creates an unreasonable expectation of beneficial treatment; or
(e) directly or indirectly encourages the indiscriminate or unnecessary use of regulated health services.
Maximum penalty:
(a) in the case of an individual, $60,000; or
(b) in the case of a body corporate, $120,000.
Two details in that text do a lot of work and are easy to miss.
The first is the opening phrase, "a person". Not "a practitioner". The prohibition catches the practice entity, the owner who has never been registered, and in principle the agency writing the copy. Subsection (2) carves out a narrow exception for someone who merely prints or publishes an advertisement for another person, which protects the printer, not the marketer who wrote it.
The second is subsection (3): a court "may have regard to a guideline approved by a National Board". The AHPRA advertising guidelines are not law in themselves, but they are the yardstick a court is invited to use when deciding whether you crossed the line.
The five limbs, in plain English
| Limb | The statutory words | What it means in practice | A common breach |
|---|---|---|---|
| (a) | False, misleading or deceptive | Do not overstate, and do not imply something you cannot support | A retouched before-and-after image |
| (b) | Inducements without terms | Any offer must carry its own terms and conditions | "20% off this month" with no expiry, exclusions or conditions stated |
| (c) | Testimonials | No patient statements about clinical care, anywhere | A Google review praising the treatment, embedded on your homepage |
| (d) | Unreasonable expectation of beneficial treatment | Do not imply a result you cannot guarantee | "Fixes back pain" |
| (e) | Encouraging unnecessary use | Do not push people toward care they do not need | A bulk-buy discount on treatment sessions |
Limb (b) is the only one of the five that has a cure written into it. An inducement is lawful if the advertisement also states the terms and conditions of the offer. Every other limb is a flat prohibition.
Testimonials: the limb with no compliant version
This is the rule practices get wrong most often, because it runs directly against every instinct that modern marketing teaches.
There is no such thing as a compliant testimonial about clinical care under the National Law. Unlike the inducements limb, no disclaimer, no permission form and no patient consent makes it lawful. Consent is irrelevant. The patient can beg you to publish it. It remains a breach.
A review saying "great waiting room and friendly receptionist" is not a testimonial. A review saying "the physio fixed my back in three sessions" is.
The distinction AHPRA draws is clinical versus non-clinical. Its guidelines state the boundary directly: reviews "must not contain statements about the quality of clinical care received from the regulated health practitioner, business and/or service."
So a review about parking, booking, waiting times or front-desk courtesy is generally not a testimonial. A review about whether the treatment worked is.
- It mentions only parking, price, booking or how friendly the staff were: usually fine
- It describes a clinical outcome, a symptom improving, or the quality of care: it is a testimonial
- You have shared, reposted, screenshotted or quoted it in your own marketing: that is you using it
- It sits on a platform you do not control, like Google, and you know it is there: you must take reasonable steps to have it removed
Three points regularly surprise practice owners.
Unsolicited reviews still count. You did not ask for it, you did not publish it, and it is still your problem once you know about it. AHPRA's guidelines require "taking action in the practitioner's power, such as directly removing, or requesting removal, of the testimonials". On Google that means flagging it for removal, and documenting that you did.
Your own pages carry third-party content. The guidelines are explicit: "A person is responsible for content on their social networking pages even if they were not responsible for the initial publication of the information or testimonial." A patient's comment under your Instagram post is content you are responsible for once you are aware of it.
Sharing is using. Reposting a patient's glowing Facebook post is not neutral amplification. It is you putting a testimonial into your own advertising. AHPRA's September 2025 visual examples document made the same point about a patient reaction video, noting the response "is a testimonial and should be removed, and consideration given to disabling comments altogether."
AHPRA does not require you to close your Google Business Profile. It requires you to act when you become aware.
What enforcement actually looks like
AHPRA publishes its advertising complaint numbers in its annual reports. The trend is the story.
Complaints assessed rose by roughly three quarters in twelve months. Within the 2023/24 figure, 446 were lower-risk complaints about registered practitioners, 140 concerned corporate entities, unregistered persons or matters assessed as serious risk, and 81 cases were closed with no breach identified.
Alongside the complaints stream, AHPRA runs targeted audits. In 2023/24 it assessed 72 practitioners and health services in a cosmetic advertising audit. Nineteen of those audits resulted in regulatory action: 10 practitioners had conditions imposed on their registration and 9 received formal cautions.
The enforcement posture is staged rather than punitive by default. AHPRA's published approach is to write to the advertiser and require correction, typically within 30 days, escalate if the advertiser does not comply, and reserve criminal prosecution for high-risk or repeat conduct. For registered practitioners there is a second track running in parallel: conduct can be referred to a National Board for professional standards action, meaning conditions on registration, a caution, suspension or cancellation, independently of any fine.
That second track is the one worth fearing. A fine is a cost. Conditions on your registration are published on the public register.
Cases that reached a court or tribunal
A chiropractor, Hance Limboro, faced 13 charges of false, misleading and deceptive advertising, including claims that chiropractic treatment could prevent cancer, and was fined a total of $29,500. That penalty predates the current maximum, so equivalent conduct today sits against a materially higher ceiling.
A medical practitioner, William Barnes, was found by the State Administrative Tribunal of Western Australia to have advertised unsupported claims about cancer treatment. He was fined $25,000 and had conditions imposed on his registration.
The parts of the rulebook that changed recently
September 2025: higher-risk non-surgical cosmetic procedures. From 2 September 2025, AHPRA and the National Boards applied a new layer of advertising guidelines to higher-risk non-surgical cosmetic procedures. The list explicitly includes dental veneers, cosmetic injectables, thread lifts, sclerotherapy, injection lipolysis, platelet-rich plasma procedures and hair transplants, and is expressed as non-exhaustive.
The new prohibitions are specific. No filters or airbrushing that exaggerate or distort a result. No idealising or sexualising a procedure. No aspirational lifestyle settings in procedure advertising. No before-and-after images of anyone under 18. An "after" photograph must state how long after the procedure it was taken, must be shot in similar conditions to the "before", and must be accompanied by a warning that outcomes vary between patients.
These sit on top of the December 2020 general guidelines. They replace nothing.
April 2026: superannuation-linked advertising. On 14 April 2026, AHPRA and the ATO issued a joint warning about practices advertising in ways that encourage patients to access superannuation early to pay for treatment. AHPRA reported 95 complaints involving medical and dental practitioners between 2019 and 2025, from which two doctors were referred to tribunals, one doctor received a formal caution, and one dentist had conditions imposed on registration.
Two regulators coordinating on a single advertising theme is a signal about where attention is going.
What to actually do this week
Not a compliance program. Four things you can finish in an afternoon.
- Read your homepage and services pages as though you were looking for a promise you cannot keep
- Search your practice name on Google and read every review for clinical content, then flag the ones that qualify
- Check every current offer states its own terms and conditions in the advertisement itself
- Turn off or moderate comments on posts about clinical services
- Delete the testimonial carousel. There is no version of it that complies
- Do not assume patient consent fixes a testimonial. It does not
The uncomfortable part of this rulebook is that it penalises exactly the marketing that works. Social proof is the single most effective lever in small-business advertising, and for registered health practitioners it is simply off the table. The practices that handle this well stop trying to smuggle testimonials past the rule and start competing on the things they are allowed to say: what they actually do, who actually does it, and what a patient can genuinely expect.
The only audited compliance figure in this area comes from dentistry, where a 2023 study in the Australian Dental Journal found that 85% of the dental practice websites audited breached at least one advertising requirement under the National Law. No equivalent audit exists for the other allied health professions. Whether that means they are cleaner or simply unmeasured is an open question.
Sources
Every figure and quotation above comes from a primary source. Where AHPRA's own site was inaccessible, the underlying document is linked directly.
- Health Practitioner Regulation National Law Act 2009 (Qld), Schedule, section 133
- AHPRA Annual Report 2023/24
- AHPRA Annual Report 2022/23
- Guidelines for advertising a regulated health service, AHPRA and the National Boards, commenced 14 December 2020
- Visual examples of higher-risk non-surgical procedure advertising, AHPRA, September 2025
- ATO and AHPRA sound the alarm on dodgy super dental offers, 14 April 2026
- Jensen et al., Australian Dental Journal, 2023, doi:10.1111/adj.12953
This is general information, not legal advice. Section 133 applies differently depending on your profession, your registration status and the jurisdiction you practise in. SwayBlu is a content tool, not a legal advice service. If you are unsure whether specific advertising complies, get advice from a lawyer or contact AHPRA directly.
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