Following a complaint by a doctor from Kerala that a pharmacy promoted its products, claiming to cure diabetes, heart and liver diseases, the advertisements have been pulled. The Kozhikode Divya Pharmacy, which is attached to Patanjali Ayurved, has stated that it has withdrawn advertisements of certain Ayurvedic products.
The ministry had also said that it found the ads to be “objectionable and misleading” under provisions of the Drugs and Magic Remedies (Objectionable Advertisements) Act, 1954. "The undersigned has immediately stopped publication of the impugned advertisements," an authorised representative of Divya Pharmacy, a unit of Divya Yog Mandir Trust, said in a letter to the Licensing Officer, Ayurvedic and Unani Services in Uttarakhand.
Dr KV Babu, a Kannur-based ophthalmologist, had lodged a complaint against three advertisements published by Patanjali Ayurved. On March 1, KV Babu filed a Right to Information (RTI) application seeking to know the status of his complaint, to which he got a response on April 19 which had advised action against the advertisements.
“Drugs claiming to cure certain diseases cannot be advertised. These advertisements appeared in February. So I sent a complaint on February 24 to VG Somani, Drugs Controller General of India, opposing one of the advertisements that claimed the product would cure heart problems and blood pressure by reducing cholesterol in a week,” KV Babu had said in his complaint. The complaint was later forwarded to the AYUSH Ministry.
In January this year, a Pune court had ordered the police to investigate a criminal complaint against the yoga guru and his business associate Acharya Balkrishna, who is Chairman of the consumer giant, Patanjali Ayurved, for their claims on their COVID-19 cure medicine 'Coronil'. A complaint had questioned Baba Ramdev and Patanjali Ayurved's allegedly "illegal and false claims" in public about the purported medicine, 'Coronil' and trumpeting it as a cure for coronavirus.