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Board-Certified and Instagram-Verified: The Rise of “Medfluencers” 

by Sofia Candalla 

Dr. Samuel Pozzi was known to be a spearhead for the public health initiatives of the 1880s in Paris. His application of asepsis technique, precise gynecological surgical practices, and insistence on making hospitals accommodating for patients have led to his reputation as an ambitious, forward-thinking physician. However, while he was a renowned physician and public health official, his personal life was frequently a subject of scandal and affair. One of his most famous exploits was a painting of him by the world-renowned, contemporary American painter, John Singer Sargent. The piece Dr. Pozzi at Home features Dr. Pozzi in a red silk robe — Dr. Pozzi’s idea of home was an environment of leisure and drama.  

Physicians like Pozzi have always been able to operate within affluent and even celebrity societies. While this type of life led by Pozzi may seem distant, the same leisurely lifestyle and strong influence can be seen with celebrity doctors in our current day. This fame has extended far beyond the reality TV landscape of “Dr. Pimple Popper” — a new genre of celebrity doctor has boomed after the COVID-19 pandemic, and they are quite literally called influencer doctors, or “medfluencers” for short. How has the “medfluencer” risen in the age of social media, and what makes their content so successful and attractive? 

To understand this phenomenon, one must first understand the prestige that comes with having an MD or DO after your name. The social capital that doctors retain in real life has extended and translated to social capital online. According to Rachel O’Neill, doctors have what is called “ideological authority,” where they retain and enjoy the reaping of their education on the medical niche of social media. The rigorous schooling, combined with the mix of knowledge and experience they gain in medical school, residency, and through the milestones of their medical journey lends physicians to a factual, educated, and generally-reliable ethos. For example, a firefighter is taught to save people from fires; a doctor is taught to save lives and maintain patients’ health. People implicitly put their trust into physicians and firefighters because they have confidence in the learned compassion and expertise of these professions. When this ethos is applied to the social media space and the medical niche, viewers can experience a sort of accessibility to physicians that they might not experience in their daily lives. Inequities in access to healthcare plague a lot of Americans, but even those with insurance can face issues with scheduling, finding specialists, and financially covering consultations can create barriers for patients from having regular access to medical advice from their physicians. Social media brings a new aspect of accessibility. This exposure lets patients learn more about their health and their potential providers through a screen. Additionally, recounting a good experience online can greatly benefit the provider they saw. “Patients share their excellent experiences with their peers or on social media about the clinic’s personalized care, expertise, and success rates,” Dr. Hasan from the Asia Pacific Journal of Marketing and Logistics Journal says while discussing this feedback loop of doctor-patient interactions and internet engagement. Satisfaction from patients not only boosts the physician’s reputation in professional circles, but also online for potential patients to discover. 

While prospective patients can learn a lot through a physician’s social media presence, prospective and studying medical students can also gain insight into how to become a “medfluencer” themselves. By interacting with and studying how more senior “medfluencers” move through the physician niche on social media, medical students can replicate and develop their own page as well. There is great incentive in doing this: students can gain access to materials, tools, and a steady income depending on the popularity of their account. “Depending on the brand, a student may make about $1,000 per 100,000 followers per year,” report Dr. Dugdale and Dr. Braswell in Academic Medicine.  

Aside from the idea of financial stability, the life of a “medfluencer” also sells the life of stability and balance in an otherwise stressful career. The road to medical school, residency, fellowship and beyond is difficult, long, financially fraught, privileged, and does not guarantee satisfaction. A study asked American residents across different specialties if they experienced feelings of burnout: 29% of dermatology residents and 54% of emergency medicine residents reported their mental and physical fatigue. Exhaustion levels might differ across specialties and milestones, but the fear of not gaining satisfaction from a career that you dedicated most of your life to can be shared among most prospective medical students. However, the concern of finding a specialty where you can maintain a work-life balance while still maintaining job satisfaction could be alleviated if you learn and gather information from people that have experienced it. In a Fortune article, dermatologist and “dermfluencer” Dr. Lindsey Zubritsky shares her lifestyle. She has a 40-hour work week and balances seeing patients with her Instagram page @DermGuru, where she manages her fanbase of almost 2 million followers. Dr. Zubritsky is the poster-doctor of a successful and popular medfluencer. Her dermatology-focused content is accessible enough to draw in an attentive fanbase who will apply her health and career advice accordingly. The medfluencer’s appeal doesn’t rely so much on relatability but on selling a sense of comfort: medinfluencers display attainability and a sense of direction for their viewers. 

It’s easy to see why patients and prospective medical students gravitate to medfluencers – in a landscape where American healthcare is expensive, unsupportive, and competitive to both patients and students alike, having support and direction in the form of a physician’s Tiktok page can ease worries and offer a semblance of security. However, having this much sway over people’s health and career trajectory is a double-edged sword; followers of these “medfluencers” must exercise caution and limit the trust they put into these doctors. Credentialed or not, medfluencers are, at the end of the day, strangers. They have not seen your chart nor are they privy of your circumstances and preferences regarding your health. In the pursuit of fame, the values of HIPAA and patient privacy can be left to the wayside. Some medfluencers have even gained power in the political sphere to promote their own dangerous and nonscientific ideologies. Dr. Casey Means, the next U.S. surgeon general, denounces raw milk restrictions and perpetuates the vaccine-autism myth, all without a certification to practice medicine. There is a real threat in the power that medfluencers have both off- and online. 

For consumers of medfluencer content, a little more than a grain of salt needs to be taken when listening to their medical and professional advice. Though ultimately, it is this new niche of content creators that must wield their education, expertise, and undeniable influence over people’s health in a responsible, safe, and informative manner.