Almost every article written for Indian doctors since 2023 quotes the National Medical Commission's Registered Medical Practitioner (Professional Conduct) Regulations, 2023. Those regulations are not operating, and have not been since three weeks after they appeared.
What governs instead is the Indian Medical Council (Professional Conduct, Etiquette and Ethics) Regulations, 2002, made under the Indian Medical Council Act, 1956 by a Medical Council of India that no longer exists: it was dissolved under the National Medical Commission Act, 2019. The regulations survived the transition. The NMC administers them and still publishes them on its own rules and regulations index, filed under the erstwhile MCI regulations.
The difference is not academic. A practice that rewrote its website in 2023 to satisfy the newer text has been complying with a rule that is not in force, without necessarily checking whether it complies with the one that is. Before you act on this page, or on any other, open that index and confirm the position yourself.
The sentence it all turns on
Soliciting of patients directly or indirectly, by a physician, by a group of physicians or by institutions or organisations is unethical.
Read it twice. It does not prohibit having a website, being findable, or telling patients factual things about your practice. It prohibits solicitation, and it extends the prohibition to institutions, so a clinic cannot do what its doctors individually cannot. The rest of the clause fills in what solicitation looks like: publicity that invites attention to your professional position, skill, qualifications, achievements or specialities, and boasting of cases, operations, cures or remedies.
The permitted side of the line is wider than most doctors assume, and a good deal of it is written down rather than inferred.
The same clause that forbids solicitation carries an express proviso listing announcements a practitioner is permitted to make in the press:
That last one deserves attention. Publishing your fees is not merely tolerated, it is named. A clinic website that states its consultation charges is on firmer ground than one hiding them behind an enquiry form.
A separate provision deals with institutions rather than individuals. A maternity home, nursing home, private hospital, rehabilitation centre or training institution may advertise, but the content is capped: the name of the institution, the type of patients admitted, the type of training and other facilities offered, and the fees. Nothing beyond that.
Applied to a website, that still leaves you a great deal. Who you are, your qualifications and registration, what conditions you treat and how, where you are and how to reach you, when you are open, what it costs, and how to book. Patient education written as education sits on the same side of the line, which is the basis of everything in how we build websites for doctors and clinics.
The prohibited side is narrower than the panic suggests, and firmer than the optimism suggests.
Two of these catch careful practices by surprise. A genuine, unpaid, entirely honest patient review becomes a problem the moment you reproduce it on your own site as promotion, because the review sitting on Google where the patient left it and the same words pulled onto your homepage are not the same act. And we are not claiming it, the patient is does not rescue it. The clause covers solicitation that is indirect, which is precisely what using somebody else's voice is.
Honestly, no published decision settles it, and any agency that tells you otherwise is guessing at your risk. The conservative reading, and the one we work to, is that a search ad shown to somebody who has already typed the treatment they want into Google is closer to being findable than to touting. The patient initiated it. Nothing was pushed at anybody.
The exposure is not the ad. It is the ad copy. A website gives you room to be factual; a search headline gives you thirty characters and rewards precisely the language the clause forbids. Best dermatologist in Mumbai. 99% success rate. Book now, slots filling fast. Every high-performing template in the healthcare category is built out of superlatives and urgency, and each one is a written claim on a platform that keeps a permanent record of who ran it and when.
Keep the ad in the same register as the site: your specialty, your locality, your timings, an invitation to book. It converts worse than the template. It is also the version you can defend, and the version we write when we run campaigns for a clinic.
Separately, Google applies its own healthcare and medicines advertising policies on top of the medical council code, and some categories require certification before ads will run at all. Those are Google's rules rather than the NMC's, they vary by country, and they change. Check the current policy before you build a campaign around it.
The medical council code is not the only thing governing what your clinic says in public. Three further layers sit on top of it, and they apply whether or not your council ever looks.
The one most articles miss entirely, and the only layer here carrying criminal rather than disciplinary consequences. It prohibits advertisements claiming to diagnose, cure, mitigate, treat or prevent the conditions listed in its schedule. If a page on your site promises to cure something, this Act, not the NMC, is your real exposure.
The Consumer Protection Act, 2019 gives the Central Consumer Protection Authority power to act against misleading advertisements, and the CCPA's 2022 guidelines set out what an endorsement has to disclose. A patient is a consumer, and a claim you cannot substantiate is a misleading advertisement regardless of which profession made it.
Self-regulatory rather than statutory, which is why it gets waved away, and a mistake to wave away. The code carries specific provisions on healthcare claims, the complaints process is fast and public, and where an advertiser will not comply ASCI refers the matter on to the relevant regulator.
Separate from all of the above, the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 governs what happens to the name, phone number and symptoms a patient types into your website. Consent wording, retention and breach handling are a website question rather than a clinical one, and we build to it by default.
A yes to any of them is worth a conversation rather than a panic, and most are a copy change rather than a rebuild. If you would rather audit the whole site properly, the twenty-point clinic website compliance checklist groups the same ground into claims, patient material, credentials, and advertising and social, and gives you the fix for each item rather than only the flag.
FAQ
This page explains the rules as we understand them, and it is not legal advice. We design websites; none of us is a lawyer. No studio, us included, can sign off a practice as compliant, because the NMC's jurisdiction runs over practitioners and not over whoever builds their websites. The obligation and the exposure both stay with you.
Regulations change, and the abeyance described above could be lifted without much warning. Verify anything that matters to your practice with your own medico-legal advisor, and check the NMC's index for the position on the day you read this.
Last reviewed: September 2026
Social media, which nobody wants to talk about
The 2002 code predates Instagram by eight years. It never mentions social media and it does not need to, because it applies to publicity through any mode. The same test covers a reel and a hoarding. The difficulty is that the format itself pushes you across the line.
A post explaining what a slipped disc is, who tends to get one and when it warrants a scan is patient education. The identical post ending with book your consultation today, limited slots this week is solicitation with education attached to the front of it. Nothing clinical changed. What changed is what the post is for.
A test that holds up
Take your practice name off the post. Does it still do something for the person reading it? If it does, it is education and your name on it is attribution. If the post collapses without the name, then the education was the wrapper and the name was the point.
Applied honestly, that test rules out most of what clinics currently post: procedure footage cut to music, patient reaction videos, before-and-after carousels, and giveaways that ask people to tag a friend who needs treatment. It leaves a great deal untouched. Explaining a condition. Correcting a misconception patients arrive with. Describing what a procedure actually involves. Answering the questions you answer ten times a week in consultation.
Three specifics come up constantly. Replying to a comment that asks which doctor is best for this by naming your own practice is indirect solicitation, in writing, on a public record. Paying to boost an educational post does not change what the post says, but it does make the post an advertisement, and it will be read as one. And an influencer collaboration is an endorsement whatever it is called on the invoice.