Medical regulations and cosmetics
At the beginning of 2022 Lyonsleaf received a letter from the MHRA (Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Authority)
We were informed that we must review our website and bring it in line with appendix 8 of their document 'A guide to what is a medicinal product' titled 'Guidance on using the internet to sell and promote products on the medicines borderline' We have provided a very brief summary below.
Cosmetic regulations and borderline medical products
Essentially this guidance requires us to remove any medicinal claims for our products. If we do provide proof of medicinal properties, by way of publishing your testimonials for example, we will be required to purchase a medicinal licence for each relevant product (£80,000).
What is a 'medicine'
A medicine is defined as:
- Anything that prevents or treats a disease.
- Anything that restores, corrects or modifies any physiological function.
What is a 'disease'
A disease is defined as:
- Any medical condition
- Any injury, ailment or adverse event of body or mind.
Customer reviews
We have been forced to remove portions of many of your existing customer reviews to adhere to these rules and we apologise for this. We have not edited any of your content, simply deleted parts of it.
We have to inform you that we will have to continue removing any part of a review or comment that contains medical claims from our website or social media feeds. Whilst we cannot prevent you speaking about your full experience of Lyonsleaf products in private or on your own social media feeds or on any platform managed by managed by us, but we are required to request that you do not make medical claims about our products in spaces we cannot police.
Other content we have been asked to remove
- Any information pages relating to medical conditions, even if these only contain general information regarding diet, triggers or skin irritants;
- any information relating to traditional medicinal use of any of our ingredients;
- links to articles or studies that discuss medicinal properties of the ingredients we use on any pages with products displayed.
- any content that encourages our customers to research medicinal properties of any of our ingredients.
We are permitted to have a single link to any relevant articles and studies regarding tradition uses of our ingredients and you can find them all on our useful links page.
Standing for freedom and choice
Whilst we are obviously endeavouring to adhere to the law, we want to make it clear that we do stand for freedom of choice. We believe that information regarding natural remedies (naturopathy) should be available freely facilitating their use in a way that complements mainstream medicine (allopathy).
Naturopathic medicine is generally concerned with strengthening the bodies natural defences and thereby preventing disease, whereas allopathic medicine tends to use powerful pharmaceuticals to address the symptoms of disease or address acute injury. It seems common sense to us that the two disciplines complement each other.
We hope that the knowledge of natural remedies is preserved for future generations. We suggest preserving this knowledge on your own bookshelves ensuring it is passed down to future generations as it has been for millennia.