Australian court orders Nurofen’s specific pain range off the shelves

Reckitt Benckiser (RB), the health and hygiene multinational, has been ordered to recall from Australian stockists a suite of ibuprofen products that claim to relieve specific types of pain after a court found it guilty of misleading and deceptive conduct.

The Federal Court of Australia ordered RB to remove its Nurofen “specific pain” range from retail shelves after the multinational admitted contravening Australian consumer law by advertising the products as able to target distinct types and sites of pain.1

Justice James Edelman ruled that all four products in the targeted Nurofen range—for tension headache, period pain, migraine pain, and back pain—were in fact identical, each containing ibuprofen lysine 342 mg. None of the products was “any more or less effective than the others in treating any of the symptoms shown on the packaging,” Edelman said in his …