Fake AI Doctors Are Here. Real Doctors Need to Show Up.
In a Nutshell
Real doctors must actively build authentic social media presence to counter fake AI doctors selling supplements, because patients need trusted clinicians to help navigate health decisions. Medical training doesn't prepare doctors for personal branding, so they must develop their own "why," learn content creation hands-on before outsourcing, and focus on long-form educational content that builds critical thinking. The key strategy is owning your audience through owned channels like newsletters rather than relying on platforms, while prioritizing internal fulfillment over external validation.
These notes were generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
Two weeks before this conversation, a New York Times article revealed an increasing number of fake doctor influencers on Instagram who are selling supplements and other products. This trend makes it increasingly difficult for audiences to distinguish between accurate, reliable medical information and misinformation designed to sell products. The concern is that this problem will only grow, making it harder to identify trustworthy sources.
People want to rely on a real human being—a trusted clinician with proper training and background—to review important health decisions. These decisions range from choosing the right supplement brand to serious choices about continuing medications for heart disease prevention or cancer treatment. The simulation aspect is particularly concerning because while people want a real doctor and crave a relationship with a trusted physician, they are receiving a fake version of that relationship.
A regular day as a clinician is already difficult, involving both intellectual tasks and transactional tasks such as billing, administrative work, and documentation. There is also the emotional labor of caring for many patients. The average primary care physician has thousands of patients on their panel, creating significant wear and tear on emotional well-being that leads to burnout and moral fatigue.
Medical training does not prepare clinicians for building a professional brand. There is no training about this in medical school, residency, or fellowship. Clinicians must figure out how to navigate social media presence on their own.
During medical school at Stanford, Dr. Hillary Lynn received training emphasizing extreme caution with social media. The advice was to be super careful and even suggested not posting what one would normally post. This created lasting concerns about the permanence of online content and how it could affect professional trust.
When starting her first startup, Curio, in the psychedelic-assisted therapy space—a controversial field—she was initially afraid to post publicly about strong opinions. She took on some speaking opportunities but found it to be a scary space. After a four-year journey, she realized it was wasted potential and that being comfortable and prepared to communicate with audiences could lead to great strides.
The external layer involves production, posting at the right times, and content management—tasks typically handled by a social media manager. While this is the most tangible layer and the one people ask about most, it is far from the most important.
The first internal layer is presentation, involving basic communication skills and getting comfortable speaking well without interrupting oneself.
The most important layer is understanding the "why" of what one is doing. Clinicians need to articulate their purpose for getting online. For some, it may be transactional—making money by promoting items. For others, it may be getting more people to recognize a clinic or projecting learned knowledge to the public. Dr. Hillary Lynn finds personal fulfillment from the process of learning, planning, communicating, and hearing audience engagement and feedback.
Medical training is achievement-oriented and performative. Clinicians take exams that are often irrelevant to actual doctoring but are required for credentialing. Many professionals get stuck needing labels, credentials, certificates, and external validation. Flipping this mindset to focus on internal fulfillment rather than external validation is difficult work for those trained in the traditional system.
There is tension because social media can feel like it is done for others, but pushing too far in that direction might not achieve desired outcomes. It is not always one or the other—momentum and energy come when the work serves others, but one must also do it for oneself.
Clinicians should figure out what they are naturally good at and what they tend toward. If one does what one is good at and what people value, one will do it better than anyone else.
Digital presence is powerful because it can be wielded in different ways, all coming down to communication and what is projected into the world. Dr. Hillary Lynn's primary goal is to learn and convey that learning to impact people's critical thinking and knowledge at a large scale, with secondary goals including supporting entrepreneurial endeavors.
Other goals include building a professional brand to open opportunities, having a mission due to personal experience or advocacy for healthcare problems, or navigating employment constraints where one must balance employer expectations with building a personal brand.
With AI and current trends, individual brands are becoming vastly more important than big company brands. For employed clinicians, this creates tension because employers may restrict what can be posted, yet building a personal brand opens opportunities. Personal brand matters more than any company brand.
There is no single right approach to social media presence. Some celebrities share random scenes from everyday life and people love that authenticity. Others are famously private with no social media or different names, yet all are successful. If comfortable being more open about private life, that can be a tool. If preferring separation like Dr. Hillary Lynn, keeping personal life outside the social media sphere while putting everything into work can feel more authentic.
Everybody is different—some grew up more open on social media, posting about personal events and family members. There is a different approach for everyone, and none are absolutely right. One should do what feels comfortable and get good at it. There are no rules about social media or content creation.
Social media can be viewed as thinking in public. It is a direct translation of thoughts, with curation determining authenticity. A viral TikTok account showed a woman with conveyor belts picking up objects for one second and throwing them aside, building a massively successful TikTok shop. This worked because the items were cheap and low-priority, functioning as entertainment.
Healthcare communication is the opposite. Dr. Hillary Lynn leans into long-form content because health decisions are deeply considered and can take years to conclude, changing throughout life. Decisions about lifelong medications for heart disease prevention involve ongoing considerations of side effects and whether to continue or stop treatment.
Clinicians are influencers regardless of social media presence because their job involves understanding science, staying current, and making informed decisions to guide patients. Long-form content like podcasts provides deep, free information that requires significant time and energy to create.
One of Dr. Hillary Lynn's friends, an MD now full-time founding without clinical practice, shared that he entered medicine thinking of clinicians as educators. Clinicians are meant to be like philosophers—taking in raw data and information from science and anecdotal evidence from seeing many patients over long periods, distilling and synthesizing it into actionable nuggets. This is education.
Traditional health systems no longer provide time for education, which is another reason Dr. Hillary Lynn is drawn to content creation. The rapid rate of information, research, and breakthroughs—accelerated by AI—creates more need for experts to sift through noise.
Clinicians should find areas for deep dives based on their own curiosity and questions. Whatever question is in one's mind, millions of people are likely thinking the same thing. When asked what to talk about on social media, the answer is to talk about what one is curious about—there are millions of people who care about the same things.
Between startups, Dr. Hillary Lynn had nearly a full year sabbatical that allowed her to do the internal work of understanding her "why" and setting up processes from the ground up. She prefers doing everything herself first, then having people help. She figured out her entire setup, recording very terrible YouTube videos in the first few months, learning by doing.
This stemmed from personal interest—she did not pursue TikTok because it was not interesting to her, but people who genuinely enjoy platforms and figure them out get really good at them.
Many clinicians are tempted to hire agencies. While this can be helpful for big businesses wanting to grow to the next step, for solo or small team founders with a message or brand to bring to the world, it is better to understand the whole process oneself before hiring and contracting help.
For long-form YouTube content, Dr. Hillary Lynn does research herself and uses AI to help because there is so much research. She holds herself to a high standard for frontier-level evidence. AI helps synthesize research, but there is also bad research to filter out.
A major social media problem is people overgeneralizing small studies, pilot studies, studies on tiny populations, or irrelevant animal models and turning them into their whole message. The lay public is generally not scientifically trained and believes this, which is one of the greatest harms a scientific or medical influencer can do.
After research, she thinks of a narrative that makes sense. Sometimes it is personal—based on experiences with herself, family, or patients. Being a clinician provides many real events and anecdotes to relate to topics.
Deciding the narrative is an art form. Storytelling is one of the most important skills to learn—not creating fiction, but conveying messages in ways that capture imagination and make topics relevant. Content needs some plot and drama, whether short clips or long-form videos.
Dr. Hillary Lynn's YouTube videos are scientific but she tries to promote motion by digging deeper into discovery stories, making people more engaged. After research and narrative development, she used to produce everything herself. She now has an in-house editor but emphasizes knowing how to do it oneself when getting started, as this helps select the right person or team to help.
She didn't come from a content background but was an executive assistant who leveled up remarkably. Finding the right person can be pure luck, but developing taste yourself is essential. Working with other content collaborators and professional agencies revealed some charge on the order of $30,000 a month, which requires careful consideration of the return on investment.
You have to develop taste yourself before knowing who to bring on. Part of developing taste is doing it yourself to understand how hard it is to make something polished and produced. The secret is that sometimes production does nothing for your content. You still have to clip out awkward things or obvious mistakes, but it doesn't have to look like a professional advertisement. People on social media aren't looking for Super Bowl ads but for things that look real, which often means not the best lighting or sound.
Don't overemphasize polish. Develop a taste for what actually matters to you and your audience. The recommendation is to do it yourself at first. For some people, watching a bunch of inspirational other handles helps decide on a style, then find the right help if that's the chosen path.
There are more and more AI tools, but they are not perfect yet, which is why having a human editor is necessary. AI doesn't have intrinsic taste and just does what you tell it to do. All platforms have general skills like cutting out silences or ums, and it's getting better at that, but it's not getting very good at what to keep and what to leave out.
Beyond production, consider your entire stack as the vertical of your media arm. For all businesses, whether it's a really thin stack or a much deeper verticalized stack like a full funnel as a full big company would have, there's some stack to deal with. Everyone needs to understand funnel strategy, from top of funnel where leads are generated to qualifying leads for conversion.
Conversion is the action you want them to take, whether signing up for a clinic visit, joining a company waitlist, or other goals. Every part of that funnel requires thought and design. Top of funnel content is typically much more broad-reaching and less thoughtful, such as Instagram reels, TikToks, or X posts. These are very low relational value but grab a ton of attention all at once, targeting people with low intent who are just in random discovery.
The longer something is, the longer focus attention it requires, creating deeper engagement and deeper intent. LinkedIn posts, articles, newsletter posts, and YouTube videos represent deeper engagement. Finally, you have owned members, which might be in your newsletter. A newsletter list is yours and separate from any platform, even YouTube, where members are technically YouTube's members, not yours.
A good strategy is to figure out how to at least convert platform members to something that is yours. The recommendation is to at least have a newsletter for that purpose if nothing else, because it's the easiest way to own an audience even if you don't even know what you're doing yet. Even if you aren't live yet with your business or clinic, at least have this bucket where you're holding them, then engage them weekly to give them little touch points.
This past year has been in build mode and conversion has been messy. All of this stemmed from just wanting to get out there and build this whole group and audience for itself, not even for any particular conversion. This approach made it a lot more authentic because the focus wasn't on making a sale.
Observing the path shows payoff recently with being called to speak and lead summits and being pulled in as a thought leader. The goal was to establish yourself as a thought leader.
Don't outsource your own learning, which means don't jump to hiring an agency or consultant. Learn how to do things your way from the ground up, and that takes time. It sounds scary, but it's so much more worth it in the end. It'll be more enjoyable, save time, save a ton of money, and it's worth it.
It all comes back to focus and time, which is the hardest currency to get for busy clinicians. It's important to build protected space. Keep in mind this is an investment in yourself, your career, and your own self-actualization, so it's important, not just a random thing.
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