Start with the money. One of the most persistent claims circulating on social media is that pediatricians profit handsomely from administering vaccines, a financial incentive supposedly explaining why they push immunizations so aggressively. Jason Levine, a pediatrician in private practice, has a blunt response to that: show it to any practice accountant. "If you told any accountant or administrator of any medical practice this, they would die of laughter," Levine said. "Practices sometimes lose money from the overhead." The irony, as he sees it, is that vaccines both save lives and save patients money by preventing serious illness. The myth inverts the reality entirely.
That specific distortion is what pushed Levine toward social media as a clinical tool rather than a professional aside. Parents, he observed, are increasingly turning to online content for health guidance before, or sometimes instead of, picking up the phone to call their pediatrician. The gap between what families are told in the office and what they encounter on their feeds is not trivial, and he decided the better response was to meet them where they already were.
His workflow for producing that content draws on AI in a carefully bounded way. He uses it as a documentation scribe and for quick clinical calculations, citing midparental height estimates as one example. For videos, he develops the ideas himself, drafts the scripts, and then uses AI to edit and review them against evidence-based standards through what he describes as very specific prompts. The delineation matters to him.
"I'm careful not to rely on AI to help me make decisions for me in practice. It can 'hallucinate' some info."
That caution reflects a broader tension in how clinicians are beginning to integrate these tools. AI can accelerate content production and flag factual inconsistencies, but the judgment about what to say, and why it matters, still has to come from the clinician. For Levine, the tool is a peer reviewer, not a co-author.
The content he produces tries to address something the clinic visit structurally cannot fix. "There's always a gap in knowledge no matter how long I spend counseling families in the office," he said. "I could speak to families for hours and still not get through everything in detail." One video on what to expect after discharge from the newborn nursery illustrates the point. The postpartum hospital stay is compressed, parents are exhausted, and the information they receive rarely has time to settle before they are home with a newborn and no immediate support. The video drew strong feedback from parents, he said. The question it raises, though, is a harder one: if families are absorbing critical health information from short-form video rather than clinical encounters, the standard of care for communication may be changing faster than the profession is prepared to acknowledge.
