There is a temptation, when a health topic catches fire online, to jump in. Cherilyn Davis, M.D., a pediatrician with a background in health communications and organizational leadership, knows it well. "I find myself wanting to jump right in to certain social media trends when sharing information," she said. But she has learned to resist the pull. The goal, as she frames it, is not reach for its own sake, especially when the information gets shaped by the format rather than by what an audience actually needs.
The problem runs deeper than social media strategy. Physicians who excel in the exam room often carry into their public writing the same habits that make them effective one on one, which is precisely where things break down. A clinical conversation is built on specificity: a patient's age, history, circumstances. Public-facing writing has to work for a much broader population, in language calibrated to where most readers actually are. Davis puts it plainly. When sharing information broadly, she said, "it's important for the doctor to communicate it in a way that's applicable to a larger average population in language that is easy to understand." That shift in register, from tailored to general, is not a lesser form of expertise. It is a different skill, and one that most medical training does not develop.
Health literacy, as a field, has long documented the gap between what clinicians know and what patients can use. Patient education materials that go unread are not simply a design problem. They reflect a failure to account for how most people actually encounter health information, in spare moments, with competing concerns, often without the context a physician assumes is obvious. The writing that works is the writing that meets people where they are, not where the writer is.
"That one person who sits down and learns trusted information from a doctor's content and applies it to their health is what really matters. A small difference is a valuable difference."
For physicians trying to build a public presence, the hardest part may be the pace of it. Davis is direct about this. "Growth can be very slow going," she said, and the absence of visible traction can erode the effort before it has a chance to take hold. Her counsel to physicians feeling that their content is reaching no one is simply to keep going. The logic behind that advice is worth sitting with. A physician who reaches one person with accurate, trusted information has done something real, even if an algorithm never registers it.
What Davis is describing, taken together, is a reorientation of what success looks like for physicians who want to shape public health dialogue. It is less about platform and more about purpose, less about the moment of posting and more about whether a single reader walked away better equipped to make a decision about their health. That framing will not satisfy anyone chasing metrics. But it may be the most honest account of what health communication, done well, actually requires.
