Last week The Medical Republic published a piece I wrote on the mental health cost of negative search results for Australian doctors (we also have the full piece on our own blog). The subhead of that article landed harder with readers than almost anything else I have written: self-promotion feels uncomfortable in a profession built on humility and service, but the consequence is a search result page that tells only one story.
Several doctors wrote back to say some version of the same thing. I agree it is a problem. I just don't know what to do about it, because every time I think about writing something for my own website it feels wrong.
This post is for those readers. It is the piece the Medical Republic article did not have room for: not why the problem exists, but what you can actually do about it when the act of doing anything feels like crossing a professional line you were trained not to cross.
The reframe: content is record, not self-promotion
The first thing that matters is to notice that self-promotion is not the only category your professional writing can fall into.
In other professions, the writing an expert does about their own work is called a record. Lawyers publish case notes. Academics publish papers. Engineers publish white papers and technical reports. Scientists publish preprints before any peer review at all. None of this is understood as self-promotion by the people producing it or by the people reading it. It is the ordinary documentation of a professional life.
Medicine has a strong culture of publishing inside journals, and a much weaker culture of publishing outside them. That is the gap. The clinical case write-up you would happily present at a departmental meeting or submit to ANZCA is structurally the same piece of writing as a blog post on your own website about a condition you have expertise in. The difference is the distribution channel. The journal is private and rewarded. The blog is public and treated, in the surgeon's lounge, as a little bit embarrassing.
This is a cultural accident, not a moral fact. The Royal Australasian College of Surgeons does not have a position that says you may not write publicly about surgery. AHPRA does not have a position that says you may not describe the conditions you treat, provided you do so in compliance with the Guidelines for Advertising a Regulated Health Service. The profession has drifted into treating public writing as unseemly. That drift was never a rule.
If you can think of your own writing as record rather than promotion, a lot of the discomfort resolves. You are documenting a professional life, not selling one.
Why doctors resist this more than other professionals
It is worth naming the reasons the discomfort exists, because the specific reasons shape the specific solutions.
The humility tradition is real and mostly good. Medicine as a profession is unusually protective of humility. The surgeon who claims too much for themselves is a well-documented professional hazard. Trainees are taught, correctly, that confidence is earned slowly and the loudest voice in the room is often wrong. Most doctors who are uncomfortable with self-promotion are uncomfortable for the right reasons.
Australia has a Tall Poppy culture. This sits on top of the professional reticence and reinforces it. In the United States, a specialist can post on LinkedIn about a recent procedure and be read as competent. In Australia, the same post is read, by some colleagues at least, as the sort of thing you should not do. The cultural penalty for visibility is real and disproportionately felt by the people who could most benefit from being visible.
Testimonials are prohibited, and that prohibition gets over-generalised. Section 133 of the National Law and AHPRA's advertising guidelines prohibit testimonials about the clinical services a practitioner provides. A significant number of doctors have internalised this prohibition as a general rule against any public writing about their own work. It is not. Educational content, procedure descriptions, condition explanations, and policy commentary are all permitted. The specific words that trigger AHPRA's scrutiny are narrower than most doctors think, and we have written separately about why "specialist" is a regulated word and what to say instead. The thing that is prohibited is a patient saying "Dr Smith fixed my back". The thing that is permitted is Dr Smith writing an educational article about the condition that caused the back problem.
Writing about oneself is its own skill, and doctors are not taught it. This is the most practical barrier. Most clinicians have never been asked to write about themselves in the first person for a non-specialist audience. The blank page is intimidating. The first paragraph feels either too modest to be useful or too confident to be tolerable. This barrier is real but solvable.
Three things that do not feel like self-promotion (because they are not)
Here is where the reframe gets practical. If you are in the position of knowing you should build some online presence but recoiling at the idea of writing content that feels like marketing, start with these three.
1. Write about a condition, not about yourself
An educational article on a condition you treat is not self-promotion. It is patient education. "Understanding Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome and Anaesthesia" is a title that would be welcome in any clinical handover. Published on your website, it does two things. It helps the patient who Googles that condition and finds a thoughtful explanation by a specialist. And it ranks for that condition in your area, which is how patients discover specialists who treat their condition.
You have not said you are the best. You have not said you are leading. You have written the same kind of explanation you would give a registrar. The audience is different. The content is not.
2. Publish your credentials as facts, not claims
Your website should have a page that states your qualifications, training, hospital affiliations, college memberships, and publications. This is not a marketing exercise. It is the same information that appears in your CV, formatted to be read by a patient rather than a recruitment panel.
Patients are not reading this page to be sold on you. They are reading it to confirm that the specialist their GP has referred them to is real, and to get their bearings before a first appointment. Making this page clear, accurate, and complete is a kindness to the anxious person sitting on the other side of the screen the night before their consult. For what this looks like in practice, see our note on why every surgeon needs more than a directory listing in 2026.
3. Write a case study without the patient
One of the most useful kinds of public writing for a specialist is a description of a clinical challenge and the approach taken to manage it, stripped of any identifying detail. "Awake fibre optic intubation in the fully fused cervical spine" is a piece of writing that is simultaneously useful for trainees, respected by colleagues, and ranking well on Google for patients who happen to have been told they need exactly that procedure.
This is the genre of writing medicine is best at. It is the ward round converted into prose. It is the case discussion written for a slightly wider audience. No one reads it as self-promotion because it does not promote the self. It promotes the thinking. The self appears in the byline and nowhere else.
Where to publish
An obvious question follows. If you write the article, where does it live? Your own website is the primary home, but it is not the only place the piece should appear. We keep a running list of the seven platforms that rank highest on Google for personal names and our practical guide to pushing down negative Google results covers the distribution strategy in detail. For most specialists, the short list is: your site, LinkedIn as a native article, Medium with an original angle and a backlink to the source, and where relevant, ResearchGate.
This matters because Google's AI Overview, the paragraph at the top of the search result page, is assembled from content across multiple high-authority domains. A piece that lives only on a personal website is less likely to be cited than the same piece distributed across three or four platforms. We have written more about this mechanism in What Is GEO, and Why Do Your Google Results Now Include an AI Summary.
What to expect when you do this consistently
A few honest observations about what happens over time.
The first article feels the worst. The second article feels slightly less bad. By the fourth, you stop noticing. The discomfort is almost entirely a function of unfamiliarity, not of the act itself.
Google is slow, and that is fine. A single piece of writing will not change your search results in the first month. Three or four pieces, published consistently across six to twelve months, will. The mechanism is straightforward. Google ranks content by authority and relevance. An authoritative piece of writing about a condition, on a site owned by a specialist who treats that condition, is almost exactly the thing Google is trying to find and rank. The work is the strategy.
Colleagues will mostly not notice. A small number will comment, positively, that they read your piece. A smaller number will comment, uncomfortably, that they did. Almost none will think less of you. The professional sanction most doctors fear when they consider public writing does not, in my experience, arrive.
Patients will notice. Not all of them, but the ones who were already anxious about their appointment will arrive better informed, less fearful, and more confident that they are in the right room. That is not a marketing outcome. It is a clinical one.
Closing
The Medical Republic piece described the problem. This piece is the beginning of the answer. The answer is not louder self-promotion. It is public writing of the kind medicine has always valued internally, extended, respectfully and carefully, to the audience that is now doing the searching.
If you have read this far and are considering where to start, the answer is almost always a single educational piece on a single condition you treat. Not a biography. Not a manifesto. One clear article, written the way you would explain it to a colleague.
That is not self-promotion. That is record. And record, in the end, is the thing that outranks a search result you wish was not there.
If you are a doctor, surgeon, or specialist in Australia and would like to discuss your current online presence in confidence, please get in touch at clare@narrativedigital.com.au. We offer a free reputation assessment and our medical content writing service is built specifically for AHPRA-compliant clinical writing. The first conversation is always free.