The Most Important Thing To Remember Before You Start A Medical Blog

As a doctor, you suffer from the curse of knowledge.

As an expert, you don’t remember what it was like before you learned what you now know. You try to simplify your ideas, but it often still comes across as too advanced for your patients. And in the end patients don’t consume your content.

This is why so many doctors don’t create content regularly. What’s the point of researching, drafting, reviewing, and promoting our content if nobody wants to consume it?

In this essay I hope to shed some light on the reason why and hopefully inspire you to go ahead and create more.

Your audience is seeking answers to the most basic of questions.

Think of the questions your patients ask you on a daily basis.

To you, they are mundane, obvious. But your patients don’t have the training and experience you have. So for them, these questions are anything but obvious.

Yet for some reason, when doctors decide to create content, we skip past the easy ones and go into the “harder stuff”. No wonder we struggle to connect with our patients.

If your patients are asking you obvious questions, it means the answers are not so obvious to them.

Get in the habit of documenting every question your patients, friends, or anyone else asks you regarding your field or specialty.

At the end of the day, take 5 minutes, open a notebook, a google doc, or your preferred note-taking app and write down every question from that day.

Then close your notebook and forget about them. For now.

Whenever you sit down to create content, simply look at your notebook and choose a question to answer.

And just for good measure, here are 3 more tips:

Tip #1: Keep it simple. Resist the urge to use jargon or to overcomplicate things. You’re giving an answer to one of your patients, not to a colleague.

Tip #2: Answer just one question. When questions feel “easy”, it is tempting to want to address multiple questions in a single piece of content. Don’t do it. Patients are just looking for the answer to their specific question, not a mini course on your specialty.

Tip #3: Don’t be afraid of answering the same question more than once. Especially in social media. Believe me, nobody remembers your content the way you remember your content. If you keep getting the same question over and over in your office, chances are patients like yours keep having the question. So keep answering it!

In conclusion, patients are not looking to become medical experts. Keep things simple and meet them where they are.