What Gulf health regulators say about dental advertising
Dubai and Qatar both publish rules on how clinics may advertise. Read them once and a lot of dental marketing starts to look different.
Last checked Before treatment, 6 min read
Information only, not medical advice. Prices vary between clinics and between patients. Confirm any treatment, and its price, with a licensed dentist before you decide.
Dubai's health authority prohibits absolute and exaggerated claims in medical advertising, requires outcome claims
to be substantiated with their risks, and sets conditions on before-and-after images. Qatar tells practitioners not
to promote themselves at all, and requires consent for patient images.
We publish this because it is the most useful consumer filter we know of. You cannot judge a clinic's clinical work
from its Instagram, but you can tell whether it is following the rules it is bound by.
Dubai: what the standard says
The Dubai Health Authority's Standards for Medical Advertisement Content on Social Media (code DHA/HRS/HPSD/ST-21,
version 1.1, effective 3 October 2022) apply to all DHA licensed facilities and professionals. Five clauses matter most to patients.
Banned wording. Section 6.11: "the best", "safest", "100%" and "immediate results" must not be used.
Outcome claims. Section 6.6: outcome claims must be substantiated and include the risks.
Before and after. Section 9.6: same person, no editing, and a no-guarantee statement.
Licence number. Section 5.2: an official account must state the MOHAP medical advertisement licence number.
No comparisons. Section 8.1.9: no claims of superiority over other providers.
There is also a disclosure rule that applies to paid promotion: section 6.7 requires that
paid relationships must be disclosed. That is the clause behind a sponsored post that never says it is sponsored.
Drawn from the published requirements. The frame is deliberately empty.
Qatar: a stricter starting point
Qatar's Department of Healthcare Professions has gone further. Circular 01/2019 says practitioners should not advertise or promote themselves,
citing the dignity of the profession under Law No. 2 of 1983.
The 2022 circular on social media sets out what is required where advertising does appear. Credentials must be exact,
so that licence number and credentials stated exactly. Patient material is protected: no patient images without consent.
And content needs sign-off, with written approval by the medical director and the practitioner.
What we could not confirm
Abu Dhabi's Department of Health runs a health media and advertising system that licensed facilities are trained on
before they submit material, but we could not retrieve a public guideline document setting out the content rules, so
we do not summarise them here. In the UAE, the federal Ministry of Health and Prevention licenses health
advertisements, including in printed and digital directories; we could not open its published guideline either.
Kuwait's Ministry of Health lists an advertising e-service, but we found no published content rules we can link to.
Those gaps are honest gaps. If you are a clinic, your regulator is the authority on what you may publish, not this
page.
How a patient can use this
Treat "best", "safest", "100%" and "guaranteed results" as signs the account is not following Dubai's standard.
Look for the advertisement licence number on a clinic's official account.
Check any before-and-after post for the no-guarantee statement and the risks.
Where a clinic claims to be better than another named clinic, note that the standard tells it not to.
How this site follows the same rules
We publish price ranges, not recommendations. We name no clinics, rank nothing, publish no before-and-after images
and make no claims about treatment outcomes. Where a price comes from a clinic's own price guide, we name the
publisher as the source and nothing more. Our methodology page sets that out in full, and
clinics can read what it means for a website on the for clinics page.