This guide is currently available in English. A Spanish version is in progress.
Clinic launch guide
Advertising a New Service Line
Reviewed by ExaVeyra Sciences editorial team · Updated 29 August 2026
Most of what a practice wants to say about a new service is sayable. Describing what a procedure involves, who performs it, what it costs, what the visit is like and what the published literature reports are all straightforward, and they carry a service line perfectly well.
The parts that need care are narrower than they are usually assumed to be, and they come down to three: what a claim needs behind it, how testimonials work, and what a before-and-after photograph is representing.
Describe the procedure, and the copy mostly writes itself
Factual description is the widest lane available and the least used. What is administered, how, by whom, over how many visits, with what downtime, at what price, is all verifiable from your own records.
Copy built this way tends to convert better anyway, because a prospective patient comparing two practices is usually trying to work out what actually happens rather than which one promises more.
Find the evidence first, then write the claim to match
The federal standard is substantiation: an advertiser should hold adequate support for a claim at the time it is made. The practical version is that if a sentence would need a study behind it, the study is found first and the sentence is written to match it.
That order matters commercially as much as legally. Writing the claim first and looking for support afterwards produces copy that has to be rewritten, usually after it has been printed.
Testimonials are permitted, with two conditions attached
Patient testimonials are usable. The federal endorsement rules ask two things of them: that the endorsement reflects the honest opinion of the person giving it, and that any material connection between that person and the practice is disclosed.
A material connection is broader than payment. Free or discounted treatment, staff relationships and anything of value all count, and disclosing them costs a line of copy.
The second condition is about typicality. An endorsement describing an unusual result implies that result is what a reader can expect, unless the copy says otherwise or the practice holds evidence that it is representative.
Treat a before-and-after photograph as a claim
A photograph pair says a result is achievable and, in context, that it is the sort of result this practice produces. That makes it a claim in image form, held to the same substantiation and typicality standards as a sentence would be.
- Written consent from the patient, specific to the use, and separate from a treatment consent.
- Consistent conditions between the two images: lighting, distance, angle and posture. Differences in these are doing work the treatment is being credited with.
- Disclosure of any retouching, filter or post-processing applied to either image.
- A record of the interval between the images and how many treatments occurred in it.
- Whether the result shown is representative, and what the copy says if it is not.
Practices that keep the consent and the interval alongside the images find this straightforward. The difficulty is almost always retrospective, when a striking photograph exists and nobody recorded the conditions it was taken under.
Your state board sits on top of all of this
The rules above are the federal floor and they apply everywhere. State medical and pharmacy boards add their own requirements on professional advertising, and those vary in ways that matter, including on how a practice may describe a practitioner’s credentials.
Anything intended to run in more than one state is worth checking against the boards for each. That is a short conversation when the copy is drafted and a longer one afterwards.
What a well-supported service page looks like
Put together, the rules above describe a page that is straightforward to write: what the procedure involves, who performs it, what it costs, what the published literature reports, and testimonials carrying their disclosures.
That page can run in every state you operate in, it survives a board enquiry, and it gives a prospective patient the thing they were actually looking for. Supplier documentation supports the product half of it, and ExaVeyra releases that documentation to practices once NPI verification is complete.
Sources
- 16 CFR Part 255, Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising (accessed 29 August 2026)
- FDA, Understanding the risks of compounded drugs (accessed 29 August 2026)