Getting your wording right on your website and promotions is a big deal. Not only can the CAP Committee of Advertising Practice and ASA Advertising Standards Agency come after you and force a change or shut you down; making unproven claims or any sort of misrepresentation by current mainstream standards also goes against the EFTMRA Code of Ethics in many different ways.
You might want to specialise in working with people who happen to also be living with a current medical condition. In every instance of marketing that a potential client may see, it is essential to stress that you work with people who ‘happen to have that condition’ in support of their positivity, resilience, emotional grounding, coping skills, forgiveness, etc and to avoid (and disclaim) any reference or suggestion that your work might result in healing, curing, or relieving the condition itself.
In general, the ASA likes to work with a big stick, bypassing chatty, informal resolutions and going straight for public rulings and bans for any media (e.g. TV ads, paid Facebook ads, YouTube ads, website content, radio ads, magazine ads etc) concerning medicines, remedies and therapies that:
- misleadingly imply the capacity to prevent, treat or cure
- discourage or appear to discourage essential treatment for conditions for which medical advice should be sought, or
- for which the business holds no evidence to support claims of any result
The ASA and CAP appear to take a highly mechanistic stance and to divide conditions up into symptoms and states. For example, while a herbal remedy company may, with sufficient evidence, market a cream for ‘Arthritic Pain’, it can not present this as a treatment for Arthritis.
From this perspective, the pain is a symptom but arthritis itself is a state that requires medical intervention.
The ASA concedes that practitioners of psychology (for example, psychotherapy, behavioural therapy, and counselling) can probably treat a small handful of ailments including grief, anxiety and depression. As an EFT practitioner with no CBT or Counselling training your best bet is to address them, support or enable people who are living with them, but avoid and decry any suggestion that you treat them.
If you would like more precise detail and to research for yourself, a good place to start is Section 12, clauses 1 and 2 of the CAP code, available on the ASA website. A document I heavily referred to in producing this article is in the ASA Resource Library: (Advertising Guidance: non-broadcast: Health, beauty, slimming and medical conditions 2008).
Author: Cheryl White, EFT Test Manager