Is there a need to regulate health care advertisement for lay public?

While waiting at Delhi’s new spanking airport lounge, a sleek billboard advertising the virtues of “Cyberknife” as a new age revolutionary treatment is bound to seize your attention. As an oncologist, it may even almost take your breath away, for such in-your-face advertisement is a relatively new phenomenon, at least in our country. You may have encountered similar instances in various public forums including lay press, all forms of print and electronic media. Medical advertisement about healthcare chains, hospitals, occasional pharmaceutical product, alternatively medicine (and of course countless quacks) is admittedly not new. Brandishing one specific product with such brazenness accompanied by a sustained, well-organized media blitzkrieg is, however, unparalleled. One has of course witnessed similar instances in the mother of capitalistic nations, the United States (the healthcare woes of community there well known necessitating Obama’s recent reforms and a different subject altogether). Such phenomenon in our country is indeed a new one.