Who writes the rules for an aesthetic clinic
Your emirate's health regulator sets the medical advertising standards. Above it sit the UAE Media Council content standards under Federal Decree-Law No. 55 of 2023, in effect since 29 May 2025, and the Consumer Protection Law, Federal Law No. 15 of 2020, which treats a marketing agency as an advertiser in its own right.
The source document for most of what follows is the Dubai Health Authority standards for medical advertisement content on social media, effective 3 October 2022: https://dha.gov.ae/uploads/042022/Standards%20for%20Medical%20Advertisement%20Content%20in%20Social%20Media2022433965.pdf.
Two more provisions from that document shape how a clinic should work rather than what it may say. Standard 5.2 requires the official account of the health facility to state the medical advertisement licence number issued by the Ministry of Health and Prevention. Standard 5.3 routes content through the facility's medical director for approval, which is why every clinic engagement we run has a named approver on the client side before a word is published.
Enforcement is live. In September 2025 the UAE Media Council started legal action against a social media advertiser whose advertisement contained unsubstantiated medical and therapeutic claims while lacking official approval from the relevant health authority (The National, 11 September 2025).
Rule one: job titles must match the licence
Standard 6.1 states that practitioners shall refrain from using any names or specialty titles different from their licence, and it names the ones it means: cosmetic specialist or consultant, aesthetic specialist or consultant, aesthetician, cosmetologist, anti-ageing specialist or consultant, cosmetic or beauty expert.
This is the most commonly breached rule in the market and the easiest to fix. Go through every doctor page, every listing biography and every caption, and replace invented titles with the licensed one. It also improves the AI outcome, because a licensed specialty is a fact a model can match to a question and an invented title is not.
Rule two: aspirational copy is named and banned
Appendix 1 of the same document lists as not acceptable references to a person improving their physical appearance and phrases such as do not delay, achieve the look you want, and looking better and feeling more confident. Federally, cosmetic content also has to carry framing that cosmetic procedures are for therapeutic or reconstructive reasons (International Bar Association UAE healthcare survey, 2024).
Standard 6.11 adds the banned vocabulary that applies to all health advertising: unique, one of a kind, the best, exclusive, safest, the only, magic, assured success, 100% and immediate results, among others. Between them these two lists remove roughly every headline currently used in the category, which is why the rewrite is a real project rather than a find and replace.
Rule three: time limited discounts are not acceptable
Appendix 1 also names content that offers time limited discounts or inducements that cannot be met, and Standard 6.11 separately bans very limited quantity. On top of that, Article 18 of the Consumer Protection Law prohibits promotions and general price discounts without a prior licence from the competent authority, which in Dubai is the Department of Economy and Tourism (https://www.moet.gov.ae/documents/20121/0/Law_15_2020_pdf.pdf).
In our research we found live clinic pages in this market running festival discounts on injectables and a free consultation described as a limited time offer, next to a displayed licence number. Those are the exact patterns the standards name. Perishable creative is legally fragile. A factual page is not.
What this changes on a page, an FAQ, a listing and a reply
Four surfaces, four habits.
Treatment pages
Clinical names, what the treatment does, who it suits, risks, aftercare and duration. No appearance promises, no banned vocabulary, no countdown.
FAQ blocks
Is it safe, what can go wrong, how long does it last, what happens if I do not like it. Answering these honestly is both the compliant route and the quotable one.
Listings
A listing description is an advertisement. Correct titles, correct treatment names, no offers, identical to the site.
Review replies
Never discuss a named patient's treatment, never claim a result, never add an offer. Thank, acknowledge, take it offline.
Content filmed at the clinic
The facility is liable for content filmed on its premises under Standard 5.5, which includes a visiting creator's video. Approve it the way you approve your own posts and keep a record of what was approved.
Why the compliant version is the version AI cites
A model cannot verify that a clinic will make someone look better. It can verify that a named licensed doctor performs a named treatment in a named district, that a published range carries its caveat, and that patients describe what they had done. Every banned phrase is a phrase a model would have to discard anyway.
So the regulator has effectively written the brief for an AI friendly website. That is the argument we make to clinic owners who think compliance is a cost: it removes the copy that never worked on machines and forces the copy that does.
This is what we write to, not legal advice. Rules change and they change quickly, so check the current rules with your regulator.