When a wellness post becomes a health claim, and what has to sit behind it.

Somewhere in almost every wellness practice's feed there is a caption like this one: improves circulation, reduces inflammation, helps the body release toxins. It reads as a description of the work. It is not. It is a claim about what the treatment produces, and that puts it in a different category with a different burden of proof.

The distinction is worth stating plainly, because it is the whole subject. Describing what you do is unrestricted. Stating what it achieves in the body is a health claim, and health claims in advertising have to be substantiated, whether they appear on a bottle, on a website, or in a caption written on a phone between two appointments.

In December 2022 the Federal Trade Commission published its Health Products Compliance Guidance, replacing advice that had stood since 1998 and was written for dietary supplements. The replacement matters mainly because of what it widened: the guidance now covers health-related claims broadly, not one product category.

The standard it applies is competent and reliable scientific evidence. In practice, for a claim about treating or improving a condition, that means randomised controlled human trials, evaluated by experts in the relevant field and generally accepted in that profession as producing reliable results.

Two consequences of that definition catch people out. Animal studies and laboratory work do not carry a human health claim on their own; they can support one that human trials already establish. And a single promising study is thinner evidence than most people assume, because replication is part of what makes a body of evidence persuasive.

The obvious objection is that this seems absurd applied to an Instagram post by a solo practitioner. That objection is understandable and it is also the point: the standard is about the claim, not the channel or the audience size. There is no caption exemption, and a story that expires does not become unsaid, because the screenshot outlives it.

There is a second requirement that is quieter and, in day-to-day content, breached more often than the first. Qualifying information has to be clear and conspicuous. If the honest version of your claim is that it helps some people, under some conditions, over several weeks, then the qualifier has to be as easy to see as the claim. A caveat buried at the end of the fourth paragraph, or placed in a story while the claim itself is a permanent post, does not satisfy that.

Sitting above all of this is a layer that has nothing to do with advertising law: scope of practice. Every state board defines what a licensed practitioner may treat and may say they treat. Describing yourself as addressing a condition outside your scope is not an advertising problem you can fix with a disclaimer; it is a licensing problem. Your board's rules are the ones with your licence attached, so they are the ones worth reading in full.

None of this leaves you with nothing to say. It leaves you with a different and, in practice, better list, because everything on it is specific to you and none of it needs a clinical trial behind it.

You can describe the process in detail: what a session physically involves, how long it takes, what the person will feel during and afterwards. You can describe who is a good candidate and, more usefully, who is not. You can describe what you look for in an assessment and why two people with the same complaint leave with different plans. You can describe what recovery actually looks like week by week, including the part where it gets worse before it gets better.

You can also say what you do not treat. That single move does more for credibility than any claim, and it is completely unregulated, because declining to promise something has never required evidence.

There is a commercial effect here worth naming, because it runs against instinct. An efficacy claim invites scepticism, and the more it promises the more it invites: a reader who has seen ten accounts promise to reduce inflammation discounts the eleventh automatically. A precise description invites recognition instead. The person reading thinks that is exactly my problem, and that reaction books appointments in a way a claim does not.

The honest note, against my own interest: the fix here costs nothing. Read your last twenty captions and mark every sentence that states an outcome in the body. Rewrite each one as a description of what you do and who it suits. That is an afternoon, it needs no agency, and it removes the exposure entirely.

Help becomes worth paying for at a later point, and it is a different problem: not knowing what to say, but sustaining it every week while you are with patients, and answering the enquiries it generates before the person books somewhere else.

A necessary note. This piece describes the FTC's Health Products Compliance Guidance, published in December 2022, and reflects guidance available in August 2026. It is not legal advice. State boards impose their own advertising and scope-of-practice rules on licensed practitioners, and those are frequently stricter than the federal standard described here.