FTC Rules for Telehealth Marketing: What the NextMed Order Actually Requires

The order to actually read

On December 3, 2025 the Commission voted two to nothing to finalize a consent order against Southern Health Solutions, Inc., a Delaware corporation doing business as Next Medical and NextMed, along with two individuals named personally: a former officer and a current one. Cite it by its FTC matter number, 232-3040, because the Decision and Order the FTC posts reads "DOCKET NO. C-" with the number left blank, and the C-numbers floating around secondary write-ups cannot be checked against it. The remedy was a payment of $150,000 for consumer redress and a twenty-year injunction.

The conduct is worth stating plainly, because the interesting thing about it is how ordinary most of it looks. Advertising quoted a program price, ninety-nine dollars in one Facebook and television campaign and one hundred nineteen dollars a month in another, that did not include the GLP-1 medication, the lab work, or the medical appointments required to get a prescription. The company claimed its members lost fifty-three pounds on average, and twenty-three percent of body weight, while, in the complaint's words, it "did not maintain records regarding the weight loss of its members." Testimonials featured actors recruited on Craigslist and a gig platform; one endorser was an officer's own mother, another was one of the named respondents. Internal messages show staff directed to add fake reviews and to use a VPN to get around a review platform's fraud detection. More than twenty-five thousand customers asked to cancel inside a twelve-month agreement that had not been disclosed, and staff were told not to process cancellations unless people disputed the charge.

The order's first operative provision is the one to pin above a marketing team's desk, and it is the only place in the whole framework where the FTC uses the word telehealth in binding language. Respondents may not misrepresent "that the cost of a telehealth service includes the cost of medical consultations or appointments, lab work, or a drug, supplement, or other medical treatment." If your pricing page shows a monthly figure and your medication is billed separately, that sentence is about you.

There is no FTC telehealth advertising guide. The telehealth-specific rules in this area are enforcement-driven, which means the orders are the specification. Read the NextMed order rather than an article about it.

Substantiation: what the standard actually says

Two FTC policy statements and a long line of cases sit behind one requirement: before you run an ad, you must already hold adequate substantiation for every objective claim it makes, expressly or by implication. For health claims the bar has a name, competent and reliable scientific evidence, defined in the FTC's Health Products Compliance Guidance as tests, analyses, research or studies conducted and evaluated objectively by experts in the relevant disease or condition, generally accepted in the profession to yield accurate and reliable results, and sufficient in quality and quantity in light of the entire body of relevant evidence.

The practical translation for weight-loss and GLP-1 marketing is blunt. The guidance states that substantiation of health-related benefits will generally need to be randomized, controlled human clinical testing, and that anecdotal evidence about individual consumers, including surveys of customer experiences, is never sufficient on its own. That last clause is where a lot of telehealth marketing lives, and it is exactly where NextMed's average-weight-loss claim failed: the company could not show its members' results were comparable to the industry-sponsored GLP-1 trials it was implicitly borrowing from, not least because trial participants dieted and exercised while some of the advertising promised neither was required.

One drafting distinction is worth keeping straight if you quote the order. The Health Products Compliance Guidance uses competent and reliable scientific evidence for health, efficacy and safety claims. The NextMed order's provision on average or typical results uses competent and reliable evidence, without the word scientific, because it governs marketing-performance claims rather than disease claims. Both are real; they are not interchangeable, and quoting the wrong one at the wrong claim is the kind of error that makes a compliance memo look careless.

Testimonials, reviews, and the rules most funnels break first

The Endorsement Guides at 16 CFR Part 255 were revised in 2023, and the current text in force dates to that revision. The revision matters because it widened what counts as an endorsement and who can be liable for one. A fake positive review used to promote a product is an endorsement. So is a tag in a social post. Buying indicators of social-media influence and then using them to misrepresent that influence is itself deceptive. And liability reaches past the advertiser: agencies, public relations firms, review brokers and reputation-management companies may be liable for their roles in creating or disseminating endorsements they know or should know are deceptive, while endorsers themselves can be liable for falsely claiming they personally used a product.

Two specifics catch telehealth funnels in particular. The first is the disclosure standard: a disclosure must be difficult to miss and easily understandable, and in an interactive medium it should be unavoidable, which is a much higher bar than a link in a bio or grey text under a fold. The second is typicality. Testimonials reporting results more dramatic than users can generally expect are likely deceptive, and the guidance says directly that a results-not-typical disclaimer does not cure the deception; what is required instead is a clear and conspicuous disclosure of the results a typical consumer can actually expect. The guidance's own worked example is a weight-loss ad, and the fact pattern the FTC later charged in NextMed is nearly the same one.

• Every paid, gifted or affiliate relationship disclosed clearly, conspicuously and unavoidably, not in a bio
• No employee, founder, investor or family endorsement without the connection disclosed
• Before-and-after and average-results claims backed by records you actually keep, not by a trial you did not run
• No suppressing, boosting, organizing or editing reviews to distort what people see
• Agency and influencer contracts that put the disclosure obligation in writing, because intermediaries carry liability too

The cancellation rule that is not in effect, and the two that are

This is the part most writing on the subject gets wrong, and getting it wrong in either direction is costly. In October 2024 the FTC finalized a broad amended Negative Option Rule, widely called click to cancel, which would have imposed disclosure, consent and simple-cancellation requirements across essentially all recurring billing. On July 8, 2025 the Eighth Circuit vacated that rule in its entirety on procedural grounds, before its compliance deadline. Effective February 12, 2026, the Commission formally recodified the rule text as it existed before the 2024 amendment. The current Code of Federal Regulations for that part contains one section, the 1973-vintage rule covering prenotification plans of the book-club variety, with the next section reserved. A March 13, 2026 advance notice reopened the rulemaking and comments closed on April 13, 2026, but no proposed rule has issued from it as of September 8, 2026.

So there is no general federal click-to-cancel mandate in force today. What there is, and what is being actively enforced, is Section 5 of the FTC Act and the Restore Online Shoppers' Confidence Act, and they cover this conduct without needing the Negative Option Rule at all. The NextMed order runs on exactly that footing: before charging, a seller must clearly and conspicuously disclose its name, a description of the product including the length of any contract, the amount and timing of every charge, and all material restrictions, all in close proximity to the request for billing information. It must provide a simple cancellation mechanism through the same medium the consumer used to buy. It may not refuse a cancellation on the strength of a minimum-term commitment unless that term was clearly disclosed before purchase.

The enforcement is current, not historical. On July 29, 2026 the FTC and a group of states filed suit against Hims & Hers, a telehealth company, alleging among other things that consumers were unknowingly locked into recurring subscriptions and that cancellation was made extremely difficult, charged under the FTC Act and ROSCA. Those are allegations in an ongoing case, not findings, and nothing here should be read as a conclusion about that company. What the filing establishes is direction: the absence of a click-to-cancel rule has not slowed enforcement against click-to-cancel behavior, and building your billing flow on the theory that the rule died is the wrong lesson to draw.

If an article tells you the click-to-cancel rule requires something of your telehealth subscription today, stop reading it. The rule was vacated in July 2025 and formally withdrawn in February 2026. Your cancellation flow is still governed, by ROSCA and Section 5, and those are what NextMed and the pending Hims & Hers case are actually built on.

What this means for a program you are running now

Work the order backwards into your funnel. If a headline price excludes medication, labs or visits, the exclusion belongs where the price is, not in a footnote or an FAQ. If you publish an average result, you need records that support it for your own patients, and if you do not keep those records you do not have the claim. If a person appears in your marketing with any connection to you, financial or personal, the connection is disclosed unavoidably. If a subscription carries a minimum term, that term is disclosed before the billing information is requested, and cancellation runs through the same channel the purchase did.

Two structural notes. First, this framework governs your conduct regardless of who operates your clinical layer, so a platform partner does not absorb it for you: the advertiser is on the hook for the advertising. Second, the individual respondents in the NextMed matter were named personally, one of them a former officer, which is the FTC's standard practice and worth knowing before anyone decides an aggressive claim is a company-level risk. Our advertising cluster covers the platform-policy layer that sits on top of all this, and the compliance checklist covers the website surface a certification reviewer sees.