When Doctors Become Content Creators

By Olusegun Adeniyi

(Text of my presentation as guest speaker at the induction ceremony for foreign-trained medical and dental graduates by the Medical and Dental Council of Nigeria (MDCN) in Abuja on Tuesday 28 July 2026)

Let me begin by congratulating every man and woman before me today who has earned the right to be inducted into the register of medical and dental practitioners in Nigeria. For me, this is a big deal. You trained far from home, in systems and cultures that are not your own. And you have returned to answer a call that many people your age is running away from. In a season when the standing conversation in every Nigerian household with a young doctor or dentist is about which direction the next flight out is headed, your presence here, seeking to be counted among practitioners licensed to serve Nigeria, deserves a national gratitude.

Having been asked to speak on the use and abuse of social media in medical and dental practice, I want to begin by stating the obvious: social media is neither a friend nor an enemy of the medical/dental profession or of any profession for that matter. It is an instrument, and like every instrument in the history of medicine, from the scalpel to the syringe, its value depends entirely on the hand that holds it and the discipline that guides that hand. Used well, it is a stethoscope that extends beyond your consulting room. Used carelessly, it is a scalpel that cuts the wrong way.

You have come home at a very critical period. The workforce crisis in our health sector is not a secret to anyone in this hall. The doctor-to-patient ratio hovers close to one physician for every five thousand people, against a World Health Organization (WHO) benchmark of one to six hundred. I am sure that every one of you being inducted today has already lived some version of that gap, whether as the overworked houseman or through the experience of a relative who could not reach a specialist in time. But here is the positive: Social media, and the digital platforms built on it are already narrowing some of that gap in small but real ways. For instance, a well-run public health page can do more for antenatal care-seeking in a single well-crafted post than a decade of poorly funded jingles. A dentist deploying Pidgin, Hausa, Igbo or Yoruba on Tik Tok, to explain why a decaying tooth needs a clinic and not a chisel from the roadside, can save more smiles than a thousand posters in health centres that nobody visits. But every gift of this kind arrives with its own shadow.

In a December 2013 journal article on the United States Library of Medicine website titled ‘Dangers and opportunities for social media in medicine’, three medical practitioners, Daniel George, Liza Rovniak and Jennifer Kraschnewski made it clear that in the age that we are in, medical and dental practitioners cannot avoid the social media. “…a growing majority of modern patients – particularly those with chronic conditions – are seeking out SM and other online sources to acquire health information, connect with others affected by similar conditions, and play a more active role in their healthcare decisions,” they wrote 13 years ago. One can only imagine the situation today. But they also added that these same tools “have introduced profound questions about confidentiality, informed consent, public/private boundaries, professionalism, and other issues of ethical import for health professionals.”

This then leads me to the few tips I want to leave with you this morning on what you should avoid in your usage of social media, because induction day is exactly the moment to hear them, before habits harden into instinct. The first and gravest is the casual surrender of patient confidentiality. A striking wound, rare deformity, dramatic delivery, and successful surgery. All these can make compelling content, and the temptation to share them, even with faces blurred or for ‘education,’ is real. But somewhere in the oath you are about to take is a promise about confidentiality that predates Hippocrates himself. Social media has not repealed that promise; it has only multiplied the ways of breaking it, and the speed at which a breach now travels. So, always bear this in mind: That patient’s body and story belong first to the patient, not to your followers on social media platforms.

The second abuse is the collapse of the boundary between the consulting room and the comment section of an online publication. Diagnosing and prescribing from a WhatsApp group chat or X thread, arguing a clinical case in the replies of a viral post etc. are ordinarily ‘harmless’. But no matter the temptation, you must always bear this in mind: Each of these actions blurs a line that exists to protect the patient as much as the medical practitioner, and each becomes considerably harder to defend the day something goes wrong.

The third is what I might call reputational contagion. Medicine and dentistry, unlike many other professions, are trusted as a collective. A single practitioner’s poor judgement online can cause a huge reputational damage not only for them but also for the entire profession. A callous joke about a patient’s condition, a video that trades a patient’s dignity for views, or a public feud with a colleague conducted for an audience. All these rarely stay contained to that one account. They become, unfairly but predictably, evidence in the case some members of the public are always building against the entire medical and dental professions.

For dentists in particular, I would add a caution about a trend I have watched grow globally: cosmetic procedures; veneers, instant whitening, dramatic ‘smile makeovers’ and many of those in-vogue procedures that are marketed with more attention to camera angles and background music than to clinical efficacy. Yes, aesthetic dentistry is a legitimate and growing field. But aesthetic dentistry practised as influencer marketing, ahead of proper assessment, is not.

None of what I have said thus far is theoretical. Around the world, regulators have had to strike practitioners off their registers over judgement exercised on social media. And there are many examples to cite: a surgeon who kept sharing patients’ procedures for engagement despite repeated warnings, until his licence and reputation both gave way under a dozen lawsuits; an online personality who built a following of hundreds of thousands by posing as a licensed doctor dispensing advice on cancer and fertility, only to be convicted of impersonation. These, of course, are extreme cases, and I do not for a moment suggest that anyone in this hall is destined for such a tragic professional fate. But then, every extreme case begins with a smaller, more forgivable-seeming decision. Currently circulating online is a Tik Tok video of a young female doctor taking camera around the wards of a private hospital that employed her and behaving like the star of a reality show before posting the content after resignation. That’s how they all begin. The extreme cases are what happens when nobody says no to these small ones. Yes, I am aware that it is more financially rewarding to chase clout than to save lives but the latter is what you have chosen and it is more ennobling. Please stay on your lane.

You are fortunate in one respect. You arrive this job at a time your regulator has already prescribed the rules of engagement, regarding the use of social media. In October last year, the MDCN issued a formal guidance on social media and responsible online conduct. I recommend it to every one of you as required reading, alongside the Code of Medical Ethics itself. Its logic is simple, and to my mind unimpeachable: the standards of honesty, accuracy, confidentiality and accountability that govern you in a ward or a surgery do not switch off when you switch on your phone. The Council also left practitioners with one warning worth committing to memory: Your responsibility for what you post online does not expire when you delete it. A private post can turn public. A deleted post can resurface as a screenshot years later. The internet, unlike memory, rarely forgets on command.

Let me leave you, then, with a handful of habits I would urge you to carry from this hall into your practice. First, if you consider it of public interest to post anything about a patient, ask for their consent. If the answer is no, the story stays untold. Second, not every provocation or viral claim you disagree with deserves a response, especially if they do not directly concern you or the institution you represent. Third, build a name, not only a following, which as we all know can be bought, gamed, or lost overnight to an algorithm’s whim. What endures is the reputation that makes a stranger say, “ask that dentist, I hear he or she is thorough and honest.” That kind of reputation is built offline, and it is the only currency that lasts. Fourth, extend to your colleagues online the same courtesy you would extend across a hospital corridor. Disagree, if you must, with the science or the judgement of another practitioner. But do not attempt anything that would take away their dignity. Lastly, use whatever reach you build for something larger than yourself.

Before I take my seat, it is perhaps important to also look at another side of this malaise. Increasingly, medical practitioners are also becoming targets. No fewer than 30 resident doctors were assaulted across Nigeria within the last year, according to the Nigerian Association of Resident Doctors (NARD) which has cited 21 assault cases. Only five of the cases have made it to court and only one assailant has been convicted. I am almost certain that most of these cases can be traced to a pattern of public harassment and trial-by-hashtag that some of your colleagues have faced online, often before facts are established, and sometimes long after they have been settled in the practitioner’s favour. A profession that polices itself honestly, through its proper disciplinary channels, should not also have to submit to this sort of barbarism.

That is perhaps why I must make this final point. You are entering this profession at a moment when public trust in our national institutions is thin and hard-won. And you have spent years, far from home, earning the letters that will now follow your names. Carry the white coat’s obligations into every space you occupy, including the small, bright one in your pocket that never quite switches off. But please do not let a single careless post undo, in a moment, what years of discipline have helped you to build.

Once again, congratulations to every inductee gathered here today. Use social media platforms wisely, and welcome home. Nigeria needed you before you left, and needs you even more now that you have returned.

Thank you very much for listening, and God bless you all.