Why We Don’t Publish Cure Claims — DMR Act 1954

You will not find an article on this site saying that any food, herb, oil, juice or practice cures diabetes, cancer, blood pressure, heart disease, obesity, infertility, or any similar condition.

That is not editorial squeamishness. It is the law, and it is also the right thing to do.

What the Act says

The Drugs and Magic Remedies (Objectionable Advertisements) Act, 1954 is a short piece of legislation with a long reach. It was passed to stop the trade in advertised cure-alls, and it remains in force.

Section 3 prohibits the advertisement of any drug or remedy that suggests or claims to be effective for the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, treatment or prevention of the diseases and conditions specified in the Schedule to the Act. The Schedule is read together with Rule 106 and Schedule J of the Drugs and Cosmetics Rules, 1945.

Section 4 prohibits advertisements that make misleading claims about a drug’s true character or its efficacy — that is, advertisements which are literally about a permitted subject but which mislead about what the product actually is or does.

Section 5 prohibits advertisements relating to procuring miscarriage.

Section 7 sets out the penalties, which include imprisonment as well as fines. The Act is not a code of practice with reputational consequences. It is criminal law.

Two points about scope are worth stating plainly, because they are widely misunderstood:

• “Advertisement” is defined broadly. It is not limited to paid promotion. It covers notices, circulars, labels, wrappers and other documents, and announcements made orally or by light or sound. Published articles that promote a remedy for a listed condition are not obviously outside that definition, and a publisher should not assume they are.
• It does not matter whether the remedy is traditional. The Act makes no exception for Ayurvedic, Unani, Siddha or homoeopathic preparations, or for kitchen ingredients. A claim that a herb cures a listed disease is the same claim in law as one made for a manufactured drug.

The conditions the Schedule covers

The list below is a list of conditions for which cure claims are prohibited. It is not a list of conditions we offer remedies for, and nothing on this site should be read that way. We publish it so readers can see exactly what the restriction covers.

The full Schedule, and the associated Schedule J of the Drugs and Cosmetics Rules, name around fifty-four conditions between them. Where our editorial screening is concerned we treat the list as a floor rather than a ceiling: if a condition is serious enough that delaying treatment causes harm, we do not publish cure claims about it whether or not it appears on the list.

What this means for our content

In practice, our standards are these:

• No cure, treatment, prevention, reversal or control claims for any listed condition — in English, Hindi or Hinglish, in headlines, body text, image captions, meta descriptions or structured data.
• No disease-targeted headlines. We do not publish “[ingredient] for [disease]” or “[disease] ka ilaj” constructions.
• No dosage protocols for treating a named disease. Quantities and preparation methods appear only in culinary and general-wellbeing contexts.
• No before-and-after health transformation claims, and no testimonials asserting that a remedy cured a condition.
• Every remedy article carries an explicit “what this does not do” section stating that it does not cure, treat or replace medical care for any condition.

How we enforce it

An editorial policy that says “we don’t publish cure claims” is worth very little on a site with several writers and a daily publishing cadence. Somebody will eventually file a draft that crosses the line, on a deadline, and an editor will be tired.

So we made it mechanical. Our publishing system runs a screening pass over every article before it can be published. It scans the headline, body, excerpt, standfirst, summary box and meta description, and it blocks publication when it finds a Schedule condition within close proximity of a claim verb — words like cure, treat, reverse, control, इलाज, ठीक करता, जड़ से, ilaj, theek kare.

The screening works across all three of the scripts this category is actually written in: English, Devanagari Hindi, and Roman-script Hinglish. A blocklist that only understood English would be decorative here.

Two design details matter:

• It blocks rather than warns. A flagged article is held as a draft. It does not publish and then get corrected.
• It fails closed. If the screening itself errors, publication is blocked, not allowed. An error in a safety check must never become a green light.

The myth-check exception

There is exactly one situation in which a Schedule condition may legitimately appear next to a claim verb on this site: when our myth-check desk is quoting a false claim in order to refute it. An article explaining why “turmeric cures diabetes” is untrue necessarily has to contain the sentence.

That exception is deliberately narrow. The quoted claim must sit inside a marked block that renders visually as a claim under examination, struck through where the verdict is false. It is stripped out before screening, so the rest of the article is still scanned normally. And the override requires sign-off from both the Editor-in-Chief and a medical reviewer, logged with a justification.

Ministry of AYUSH advertising norms

The Ministry of AYUSH has issued repeated advisories against misleading advertisement of Ayurveda, Yoga and Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homoeopathy products and claims. Manufacturers and advertisers have periodically been directed to withdraw claims that a preparation cures specified diseases.

Our editorial response is structural rather than cosmetic. Ayurveda content on this site is framed as cultural heritage, historical practice and current research context — never as clinical prescription. An article about a classical concept explains what the tradition holds, where the idea comes from, what modern research has examined, and what remains unstudied. It does not tell a reader to take something for a condition.

That framing is not a disclaimer bolted to the top of an otherwise prescriptive article. It determines what the article can contain.

CCPA guidelines on misleading advertisements

The Central Consumer Protection Authority’s Guidelines for Prevention of Misleading Advertisements and Endorsements for Misleading Advertisements, 2022 bar misleading claims and impose obligations on advertisers and endorsers alike, including disclosure of material connections.

For us that means any sponsored content passes the same editorial, DMR and medical-review pipeline as our own articles, carries clear labelling, and can be refused. No sponsor may influence an evidence label. We do not publish sponsored content that makes a health claim.

FSSAI claims regulations

Nutrition content sits under the Food Safety and Standards (Advertising and Claims) Regulations, 2018, which govern what may be claimed about foods — nutrient content claims, health claims, and the substantiation required for each.

Our nutrition writing therefore stays on the descriptive side: what a food contains, how it is prepared, how it fits into a meal, what is in season. Where we mention a possible benefit, it is stated with the strength the evidence actually supports and carries a source.

Why this matters beyond compliance

It would be easy to present all of the above as bureaucratic constraint. It isn’t, and treating it that way would miss the point.

A great deal of Hindi and English health content online ignores every one of these rules. Headlines promising that a kitchen ingredient reverses diabetes or dissolves kidney stones are everywhere, and they perform well, because they answer a question people are desperate to have answered.

The harm is not abstract:

• Delayed treatment. Someone with a new diagnosis who spends four months on a remedy instead of starting treatment does not get those four months back. In conditions where progression matters, this is the difference that matters most.
• Interaction risk. Several herbs and concentrated extracts interact with common prescriptions — anticoagulants, glucose-lowering drugs, immunosuppressants. A reader who adds a remedy to an existing prescription without telling their doctor may be taking a real risk while believing they are being careful.
• Financial exploitation. The cure-claim economy sells things. The people most exposed to it are often those with the least money and the fewest options.
• Erosion of trust in both directions. Overclaiming on behalf of traditional practice does not serve that tradition. It makes serious research harder to hear, and it gives people a reason to dismiss the whole field.

The content the law prohibits is, for the most part, the content that hurts readers. We would decline to publish it in a jurisdiction that permitted it.

Report a violation on this site

We are not claiming to be perfect. Screening catches term-based violations reliably; it will miss an implied claim expressed in a construction we did not anticipate.

If you find content on this site that violates these standards, email compliance@wellorganichealth.in.net. We will review within 48 hours and remove or correct it. Corrections are logged publicly at our corrections page.

We also run a monthly audit: a random sample of twenty published articles is re-screened, and anything found is corrected and logged.