00:00 These changes are all around how services are promoted in the cosmetics injectables
00:07 industry. At the moment, the rules state that service practitioners cannot advertise any
00:13 specific medicines. That includes things like Botox. But the workaround for that has been
00:19 to advertise in generic or colloquial terms. So things like anti-wrinkle treatments, for
00:24 example. Under the new rules, practitioners will not even be able to use that kind of
00:30 language around the services they provide. Now, all of this comes at a time when the
00:34 cosmetics injectables industry is booming. It's estimated Australians spend about $1
00:40 billion a year on non-surgical cosmetic procedures, and that's expected to increase up to 20%
00:47 year on year. Australian medical practitioners, we are well-trained, we're well-educated,
00:53 we're all very ethical, so they're not going to be able to get that information from us
00:57 anymore. And even if someone was to, say, approach my business through a social platform,
01:02 I basically have to say, "Sorry, I can't tell you." So it all just kind of looks a little
01:06 bit sneaky. We're not able to be transparent anymore. We're not able to educate properly.
01:13 It's all about how to regulate this booming sector. The Australian Health Practitioners
01:18 Regulatory Agency, or APRA, currently has a hotline to dob in dodgy practitioners. It's
01:25 been operating for about 18 months and has 600 complaints so far, leading to about 14
01:32 practitioners being banned from providing any kind of surgical injectable services.
01:39 Jason McIsa from APRA does say that things like social media make it a lot easier to
01:47 downplay the risks of these services. The challenges of the cosmetic industry is
01:51 really commercialised medicine, and social media makes things look really simple. But
01:56 yeah, cosmetic surgery and cosmetic procedures, they're not like a haircut. A bad haircut
02:00 will grow out, but cosmetic surgery and procedures have risks that might not be so easy to fix.
02:06 APRA currently has a public consultation open for members of the public as well as practitioners
02:12 about how new guidelines can look when it comes to patient safety.
02:15 [BLANK_AUDIO]
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