ABSTRACT
In a letter to the editor of the New York Times, on August 6, 1977, Charles Harris. M.D., laments the recommendation of the New York Board of Regents that doctors and other professionals be allowed to advertise in the press and on television. Recounting that his father, also a doctor and dental surgeon, had spent a great amount of energy in eliminating dental parlors in New York and the advertising that enabled them to exist, he bemoaned that measures were being taken “permitting some among us to optimize their talents as entrepreneurs, rather than physicians.” That recommendation was not an arbitrary decision: it was in compliance with the law of the land, the result of a Supreme Court decision in 1977 to the effect that professional associations—in this case, the American Medical Association (AMA) and its affiliated state and local societies—were not exempt from antitrust regulations. This meant that these associations did not have the right to prohibit their members from advertising their services, that is from soliciting business, because to do so constituted an illegal restraint of trade, inhibiting competition, driving prices up or fixing them, and depriving the public of information (including the cost of services) needed to select a physician. The Court decision itself upheld an earlier charge made by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in 1975 that the AMA inhibited competition through ethical restraints on advertising and solicitation, a ruling the AMA had appealed and eventually lost. This decision did not apply to medicine only: in its recommendations, the New York Board of Regents specifically listed twenty-nine professions including medicine. Each state makes its own rules regarding professional advertising, although the Court ruled that the AMA may regulate advertising that is false and misleading.
