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If you are on any social media platform, you’ve likely seen them. Medical professionals who are gaining a following because of the funny way they portray the medical community. Medical professionals who are fighting against misinformation (as they define it). Medical professionals who are selling their own products, or their content, including advertisements for someone else’s products.

It used to be that to get medical advice, you had to go to your doctor–the one in your town, who had an office and everyone knew where “Doc” was, especially if he wasn’t in the office that day. Today, you can hear about all kinds of medical things online from real medical professionals who are talking about things that matter to you.

It doesn’t matter if you suffer from a common illness, or a chronic disease that only a few hundred people deal with. You can find someone who knows things about it, or at least they’ll talk about it online. What happens when you search online, find a doctor who is talking about your symptoms, and what she has done with other patients that has worked, or who may be talking about an experimental treatment option that your normal physician hasn’t recommended to you?

Having reviewed several medical professional liability policies, I haven’t found an explicit “social media exclusion,” which would exclude a doctor’s social media activity, but as with everything insurance-related, there’s more to it than that.

The bigger question is whether a YouTube video triggers coverage for a medical professional. Here’s how the ISO PR 00 01, Physicians, Surgeons and Dentists Professional Liability Coverage Form reads. (Note: Because of the sheer volume of both admitted and non-admitted coverage forms available, we have chosen to limit our discussion to this ISO form. Your coverage forms will vary, and don’t forget to read the full policy.)

We start with selections from the Coverage A – Insuring Agreement.

We will pay those sums that the insured becomes legally obligated to pay as damages because of injury to which this insurance applies…

The insurance applies to injury only if: The injury is caused by a “medical incident” that takes place in the “coverage territory”; The injury occurs during the policy period; The injury arises out of the individual insured’s profession as a physician, surgeon or dentist; and…

Immediately, we see that coverage is limited to injuries that are caused by a medical incident (as defined in the policy) that takes place in the coverage territory (as defined in the policy) and arising out of the individual’s profession as a physician. The first hurdle in making a medical professional claim is whether posting content to social media would be considered the insured’s profession as a physician. Is it normally within the duties of a doctor to post content online?

No. It couldn’t be considered part of the normal duties of a physician, especially since according to the American Medical Association, there are roughly 900,000 active physicians treating patients in the United States as of January 2026, and according to the Journal of the American Medical Association, only about 7.5% of them have any measurable monthly social media activity. We can use this information to state that it doesn’t appear that posting online content falls within a physician’s profession. That leads us to ask whether the posting of content online could be considered related to a medical incident as the policy defines it.

“Medical incident” means any act or omission: Arising out of the providing of or failure to provide professional medical or dental services by: The insured; or Any person acting under the personal direction, control or supervision of the insured.

Is posting content online providing or failing to provide professional medical services? That seems like a stretch in most contexts.

One popular medical professional parodies different medical specialties, including conversations between doctors and discussion of fictional patients. Could that be considered providing medical services? Not at all, since this doctor is essentially performing a skit, not treating any particular patient.

Another popular medical professional posts responses to TV medical dramas and viral medical TikToks. He’s not responding to any particular patient. He’s trying to give general information and deal with misinformation.

From this information, we’re going to look at the content that the doctors are putting online. While educational, entertaining, and sometimes even binge-worthy, it’s not actual medical advice. The doctor isn’t talking to a patient about their particular case, so therefore they aren’t providing any kind of medical service or even offering to provide any medical service. That is, until someone in the comments section asks a pointed and specific question. hat’s where the doctor must make a decision on how to engage with that person.

The doctor begins to walk in gray areas when he or she engages in conversations, whether through direct messages, responding to comments, or answering live questions in a live stream. Those conversations could give rise to developing a physician/patient relationship, where there is a duty of care owed.

The well-meaning doctor who just wants to help someone could enter the arena of professional liability simply because they tried to be kind to some stranger on the internet.

That’s not to say that all interactions instantly create a relationship, but doctors who are building a following online by producing content need to be aware of what they’re saying and to whom.

Of course, none of this is a promise that a physician who is posting online content could never be sued for malpractice because of a video, a comment, or direct message conversation that they have with someone on the internet. The promise is that whatever the physician is doing, in some ways, they’re always physicians, and because of that, they can’t simply “take off the doctor hat”–especially when they’re still wearing their custom scrubs in their videos.

Topics Liability Medical Professional Liability