Stating what your pharmacy offers without saying what a medicine does

What rules on advertising medicines are for, and what that leaves a page

Rules on advertising medicines and health services exist so that what the public reads about a medicine matches what is known about it, and so that nobody is talked into one by a promise. What they allow, forbid and require differs by jurisdiction, and this page states none of it. Your regulator, and your counsel, are the ones to ask.

What the purpose leaves a pharmacy's page is a division of labor. Facts about the pharmacy are the pharmacy's to state: its services, its stock, its hours, its people. Words about what a medicine does belong to the product's approved information. Everything in between, a recommendation, a comparison, a promise about how someone will feel, is the part to leave out, or to put to the regulator before it goes anywhere.

The division matters more once an assistant is reading. With web search on, an AI assistant reads a handful of pages before it answers, and it can repeat any sentence it found there with your pharmacy's name beside it. A claim on your page can become a claim in someone's answer, in your name, to a person you never spoke to.

Facts about the pharmacy, written as facts

Each question a customer brings has an answer that is either a fact about the pharmacy or not the page's to give. The table sorts them. Brackets are yours, and every line is a template; the rest of what a pharmacy's site states, from hours to delivery, is in the overview for pharmacies.

The middle column never describes an effect. It says what exists (a service, a stock line, an hour), who provides it and how to get it. A sentence that starts to say what a product or a service does for someone's body is describing an effect, and it belongs either to the maker's approved words, quoted, or to nobody.

A product's own words come from its approved information

Where a product has approved information, such as the leaflet in the pack, the label or the maker's published product information, those are the only words a page uses about what it does. Quote them exactly, name the maker and the document, give the date you read it, and link the maker's own published copy where one exists. That is a source citation in the plain sense: a reader can open it and see the words were not yours.

Add nothing. A paraphrase is your sentence, not the maker's, and so is a summary, a comparison with another product or a line such as "a customer favorite". Where the maker's words would need explaining, the page sends the reader to the pharmacist rather than explaining them itself.

Whether a given product can be named on a public page at all, and whether its approved words can be used in promotion, differs by jurisdiction and by the kind of product. That is a question for your regulator before the page goes up. And when a maker changes its information, the quote changes with it or comes down, which is one of the triggers in the pharmacist's review routine.

Service pages that describe the service, not its effect

Each service your license covers where you operate, a vaccination, a medication review, a blood pressure check, gets a page that describes it the way an appointment is described: what it is called, who provides it, when, how to book, how long it takes, what to bring and, where it is stated at all, the price. It says nothing about what the service does for anyone's health. A template, with every line yours to fill:

[Service name, as your license or the program names it]

Offered at:     [Pharmacy name], [address]
Provided by:    [pharmacist's name], [title as the licensing body writes it]
When:           [walk-in: days and hours] or [by appointment: how to book]
Takes about:    [n] minutes
Bring:          [what you ask customers to bring]
Who it is for:  [the program's own wording, quoted, with a link]
Price:          [price, as of date], or [billed to the program or plan, where it is]

Is this right for you? Ask our pharmacist: [hours], [number].

The last line does honestly what a health claim tries to do. It sends the question of whether the service suits someone to a person who can answer it, and it gives an answer something true to repeat: the hours a pharmacist is there to be asked. Which services a license covers, and who a program is for, differ by jurisdiction, so both appear in the license's and the program's own words, never as a rule the page explains.

The markup says what the page says, and nothing more

Structured data is published text too, held to the same line. The pharmacy's node describes the pharmacy: its name, address, hours, license and services by name. Each service can be a Service node with a name, a provider and the hours it is available, and its description, if it has one, is a fact sentence taken from the visible page. Google's introduction to structured data asks for markup that describes what a visitor can see, and its general guidelines rule out misleading content.

Leave medicines out of the markup unless your regulator's rules and your counsel have cleared their appearance on the page, and then mark up only what the page shows: the name, the maker, the quoted words. A description field is easy to fill and invisible to a visitor, which makes it the easiest place for a claim to slip in that would never be printed on the page.

When an answer credits your pharmacy with a claim it never made

An answer can attach a claim to your name that no page of yours makes: a ranking of a product you stock, a statement about what one of your services does for a condition, advice your pharmacist does not give. The source can be an old flyer still online, a directory description someone else wrote, another site's copy, or a model filling a gap on its own, which the glossary calls a hallucination. The steps are the same whichever it turns out to be.

1. Keep the answer whole: the question, the assistant, the date, the claim in the answer's own words, and any page it cited.
2. Search everything you publish for the words: every page, the markup, posts, the newsletter archive, and PDFs or flyers still on the site. If the words are yours, take them down, and put the replacement through the review routine before it goes up.
3. Check what others publish about you: the Business Profile description, directory entries, a buying group's member page. Correct what you control, ask the others in writing, and note the date.
4. Do not answer the claim by repeating it. A page that denies a claim in the claim's own words publishes those words again. State the fact instead: what you offer, in your own terms.
5. Tell the pharmacist in charge, keep the record with its dates, and put the same question to the assistants again the next month.

The general procedure for wrong facts about any business is in the article on correcting what answers get wrong. What differs for a pharmacy is the kind of fact. A wrong hour costs someone a wasted trip. A health claim beside your name is a statement about a medicine that you never made, which is why the pharmacist in charge hears about it first.