After a scribing shift, I opened TikTok and found myself inside a growing hub the internet calls “Doc-Tok,” a thriving community of health care professionals sharing clinical takes, career glimpses, and the unfiltered reality of working in medicine. What I did not expect was how much of it was fear. Providers describing terminations over comments that any other member of the public could post freely. Nurses parsing their captions for anything that could be flagged. A collective anxiety about saying the wrong thing on the wrong platform because institutions had written policies broad enough to punish almost anything.

On a platform where influencers and actual doctors are nearly indistinguishable behind the screen, the consequences can be alarming. What troubled me the most was not the misinformation itself but rather the audience. Viewers were not cross-referencing claims made by influencers, nor were they consulting their providers. They were trying out the haphazard regimens themselves and then recommending them to others. Perhaps no better example illustrates this than “period scooping,” a trend that began circulating when a creator claimed that their gynecologist had manually removed their menstrual blood so they would not have to experience their period in the following week. Within weeks, comment sections across all social media platforms were flooded with women recommending the procedure to one another ahead of weddings, vacations, and events. No peer-reviewed evidence. No provider consultation.

What makes this particularly striking is not that misinformation exists, but that the institutions best positioned to counter it have chosen silence and, in many cases, have actively enforced it.

Throughout their professional careers, providers are given the same directive: Keep your social media presence minimal, keep it professional, and if possible, stay offline. The guidance is understandable, especially when it comes to protecting patient privacy, managing liability, and preserving an institution’s reputation. But the execution has created something that is far more damaging than a misunderstood post could: a divide. The providers being pushed off these platforms are nurses, physician assistants, and physicians, some of the most credible health care providers there are, and they are being discouraged from occupying the same digital spaces where their patients are being actively misled. Whether it be due to the fear that a passing comment could jeopardize their careers or the lack of clear guidelines on what responsible engagement looks like, credentialed providers are stepping back, and the gap in our community health is being filled by creators who simulate medical authority without any of its accountability. This is how a wellness influencer becomes the person explaining hormones to millions of viewers. This is how period scooping moves from a single anecdote to a widespread recommendation circulating in comment sections worldwide.

The providers best positioned to correct this are also the ones most absent from it. Providers are people, too. They come from different backgrounds, hold opinions, and experience the emotional weight of their work in ways the public rarely sees. The clinicians who have built platforms on social media like Instagram and TikTok are actively making health care feel human and accessible beyond medical institutions. This does not mean that anything goes. There is a difference between a provider humanizing their profession versus one spreading unsubstantiated clinical claims. The line between a physician sharing their experience and a chiropractor presenting themselves as the equivalent of a medical doctor may not be clear to all and thus needs institutional guidelines to draw it. Right now, most health systems do not have those frameworks.

The clinical cost of this absence has been impossible to ignore. I moved through enough clinical settings to watch how patient defensiveness has changed over time.

Three years ago, the resistance I encountered was rooted mainly in the fear of the unknown. A young couple entered the pediatrics clinic timidly but firmly when their newborn’s physician recommended the required vaccination schedule. The father pushed back against all the vaccines besides the polio vaccine, which he recognized. What was first thought to be resistance turned out, through patient conversation, to be rooted in their own experience: new immigrants working through an unfamiliar health care system. The physician did not argue. He closed the loop, and the couple left with a clearer understanding of their child’s medical needs and what resources they had available to them.

What I encounter now, at an internal medicine clinic, is something structurally different. Patients arrive preinformed. I have watched patients hand the physician printed screenshots from TikTok posts on bloodwork they want done or read aloud a trending diet plan they learned from their favorite influencer. Instead of starting each visit with a clean slate, it starts off with a perspective that the patient has already built, and the physician now must understand and dismantle any mistakes before any actual care can begin. This is patient re-education, and it is consuming clinical time in ways that go beyond how appointments are structured, how providers are trained, and how we assess care quality. In these cases, providers are working against sources that they cannot see, cannot cite, and cannot discredit without risking their patients’ trust. This new form of defensiveness comes from platforms with no clinical oversight, no accountability, and an algorithm that rewards confidence and engagement over accuracy.

The answer is not to abandon social media. The answer is for institutions to start engaging in the platform that much of the patient population is invested in.

Three things need to change. First, institutions need policy frameworks that make distinctions, separating harmful clinical misinformation from personal expression that any member of the public could freely share. Second, responsible social media engagement should be treated as a clinical skill, not a liability. The teach-back method works in exam rooms; a credentialed provider correcting a viral health claim before a patient ever walks through the door is the same principle at scale. Third, providers need protected frameworks for personal expression. They are members of the public first, employees second.

Medicine has always gone where patients are. If our patients are on social media, then it is time institutions design systems that protect both their patients and their providers from the rising cost of misinformation.

Trisha Majumdar is a medical student.