There’s a particular kind of condescension that lives in the healthcare space, and if you’ve spent any time on social media watching doctors, dietitians, or other credentialed professionals talk about their patients or the general public, you’ve probably seen it.
It usually looks something like this: someone without a medical degree or nutrition certification shares their experience with a dietary change—maybe they reversed their prediabetes, or their autoimmune markers improved, or they just feel better than they have in years. They share what they did, what they learned along the way, and what they wish they’d known sooner. They’re not selling anything; they’re just telling their story.
Then someone with letters after their name shows up in the comments—or makes an entire post about it—to remind everyone that this person isn’t qualified to talk about health. That they “did their own research,” and that phrase gets wrapped in sarcasm like it’s something to be embarrassed about.
I’ve been watching this happen for years. Long before I became a certified health coach, long before I sat for my board certification, long before I ever worked on a clinical care team. I watched it as a regular person trying to figure out my own health—and it made me feel small.
Now I’m on the other side. I hold the highest certification a health coach can achieve in the United States. I’ve logged over 2,000 clinical hours. I work on a metabolic health care team with a high-volume, revolving patient caseload. I’ve sat across from hundreds of private clients and clinic patients and watched what works and what doesn’t—in real time, with real humans, not in a textbook.
I’m sharing those credentials not to flex, but because what I’m about to say carries more weight when you know I’m not saying it from the outside looking in.
People without formal education or certifications teach me things all the time. They notice patterns I haven’t considered. They ask questions that expose assumptions I didn’t realize I was carrying. They bring lived experience that no curriculum could replicate—because no curriculum was designed around their body, their history, their life.
That’s not a threat to my expertise. That’s a gift.
The Confusion Between Wisdom and Education
Here’s the thing: education and wisdom are not the same. They overlap sometimes, and when they do, it’s powerful. A well-trained clinician with deep empathy and years of real-world experience? That’s the gold standard. I’m not arguing against education; I’m arguing against the idea that education is the only path to understanding.
Education is structured. It follows a curriculum. It’s tested and credentialed and, in many cases, funded by institutions with their own interests. It gives you a framework—a lens through which to interpret information. That lens is valuable, and I’m grateful for mine.
Wisdom is different. Wisdom is what happens when someone pays close enough attention to their own experience—or someone else’s—to notice something true. It doesn’t require a degree. It doesn’t require permission. It requires honesty, curiosity, and enough humility to let reality correct your assumptions.
I’ve met people with no formal health education who understand their own metabolic health better than some of the clinicians I’ve encountered. They’ve read the research. They’ve tracked their own labs. They’ve experimented with dietary changes over years and paid attention to what happened—not just the number on the scale, but how they felt, how they slept, how their mood shifted, how their energy changed throughout the day.
That’s not “doing their own research” in the dismissive way social media uses the phrase. That’s a human being taking responsibility for their own health. That should be celebrated, not mocked.
Who Actually Works for Whom?
Something I think about a lot is how the power dynamic in healthcare got so inverted.
The doctor doesn’t employ the patient. The dietitian doesn’t employ the client. The health coach doesn’t employ the person sitting across the Zoom screen. It’s the other way around—every single time.
The patient or client is the one paying for a service. They’re the one whose body is on the line. They’re the one who has to live with the consequences of every decision made in that room, long after the appointment ends and the provider moves on to the next chart.
That means they’re the boss. Not in a combative way—not “I know better than you, so don’t bother advising me.” In a foundational, ethical way. They have a right to informed consent, which means they have a right to understand what’s being recommended and why, to weigh that against everything else they know about their own body, and to make a decision that feels right for them—even if it’s not the one the provider would choose.
Respecting informed consent means respecting someone’s right to do their own research. It means treating the person across from you as a partner in their own health, not a subordinate who should just follow orders and stop asking questions.
When I see a credentialed professional publicly shaming someone for “doing their own research,” what I actually see is someone who has confused authority with service. They’ve forgotten who they work for.
The System That Created This
I want to be careful here, because I don’t think most of the people who do this are bad people. I don’t think they wake up in the morning hoping to belittle someone. In my experience, the vast majority of doctors, dietitians, nurses, and health coaches entered this field for the right reasons—they wanted to help people.
The problem isn’t the individual; it’s the system that trained them.
Medical and nutrition education, by design, creates a hierarchy. You study for years. You pass exams. You earn a title. You’re told—explicitly and implicitly—that you are now an expert, and the people who come to you for help are not. The system reinforces this every single day: the white coat, the clipboard, the seven-minute appointment where you’re expected to diagnose, prescribe, and move on. There’s no time to listen. There’s barely time to explain. The structure itself teaches providers that their knowledge flows in one direction—downward.
When someone shows up to that dynamic already informed—already having read studies, already having tried things, already having opinions—it can feel threatening. Not because the provider is insecure (though sometimes that’s part of it), but because the entire model they were trained in doesn’t have a lane for that kind of patient. The system didn’t prepare them for a collaborative relationship; it prepared them for a prescriptive one.
That’s a systems problem, not a character flaw. I can hold that truth while also saying: the impact on the person being talked down to is real, regardless of the reason behind it.
What I See in Practice
I work with private clients and clinic patients every day who have been dismissed, belittled, or made to feel stupid by a previous provider—sometimes for asking a question, sometimes for bringing research to an appointment, sometimes just for suggesting that a dietary approach might be worth trying before reaching for a prescription.
The damage that does is hard to overstate. It doesn’t just hurt in the moment; it teaches people to stop advocating for themselves. It teaches them that their instincts don’t matter. It teaches them to sit down, shut up, and take the medication—even when something inside them is screaming that there might be another way.
That’s the opposite of empowerment. That’s learned helplessness wrapped in a medical degree.
What I’ve found—in my experience, so far—is that the most transformative client relationships happen when I treat the person across from me as the expert on their own life. I might know more about metabolic pathways, or lab interpretation, or the research on a specific nutrient. They know more about their body, their history, their patterns, their struggles, and their capacity for change on any given day.
Neither of us has the full picture alone. Together, we get closer.
The Research Problem
Let me address the “do your own research” thing directly, because I think there’s a legitimate concern buried underneath the condescension.
There is bad health information on the internet. There are people promoting dangerous protocols. There are influencers selling supplements they don’t understand to audiences who trust them. That’s real, and it’s worth taking seriously.
The answer to that problem is not to tell people to stop researching. The answer is to help them research better. Teach them what a well-designed study looks like. Explain the difference between a randomized controlled trial and an observational survey. Show them how to spot a conflict of interest in a funding disclosure. Give them the tools to evaluate information for themselves—because the alternative is asking them to just trust you, and “just trust me” has a pretty poor track record in healthcare.
When a client brings me a study or an article, I don’t dismiss it. I read it with them. We talk about what it says, what it doesn’t say, and how it applies (or doesn’t apply) to their situation. That’s not a threat to my credibility—it’s an expression of it. A confident practitioner doesn’t need the client to be uninformed in order to feel competent.
Credentials as Context, Not Superiority
I’m proud of my credentials. I worked hard for them, and they represent a genuine commitment to serving people at the highest level I can. My board certification matters to me—not because it makes me better than anyone, but because it pushed me to grow in ways I wouldn’t have pursued on my own.
Here’s what my credentials don’t do: they don’t make me incapable of being wrong. They don’t guarantee that my understanding of a topic is more complete than someone who’s been living with that condition for twenty years. They don’t override the lived experience of the person in front of me. They don’t give me the right to talk down to anyone.
I still learn from my clients. I still learn from people on the internet who have no letters after their name. I still read something at least once a week that makes me rethink a position I held. That’s not a weakness—it’s the whole point. The day I stop learning from the people I serve is the day I should stop serving them.
What I’d Say to Both Sides
To the credentialed professionals who feel compelled to police who gets to talk about health: I understand the impulse. I really do. You’ve invested years of your life into understanding these topics at a deep level, and it can be frustrating to watch someone with a large following oversimplify or misrepresent something you know to be more nuanced. That frustration is valid.
The way you express it matters, though. When you mock someone for “doing their own research,” you’re not just correcting misinformation—you’re telling every person who reads that post that their curiosity isn’t welcome, that their questions aren’t valid, that health literacy is a gated community and they don’t have the key. You’re reinforcing the very power dynamic that makes people distrust healthcare in the first place.
You can correct misinformation without condescension. You can educate without degrading. You can hold your expertise with confidence and still leave room for someone else to teach you something.
To the self-educated health advocates: keep going. Keep reading. Keep asking questions. Keep paying attention to your own body and your own experience. Stay honest with yourself about what you know and what you don’t—and stay open to being wrong. That’s not a weakness; that’s what the best practitioners do, too.
The Real Measure
The measure of a great practitioner isn’t how much they know. It’s how they make people feel when those people don’t know as much.
If your knowledge makes people feel empowered, informed, and capable of participating in their own health decisions—you’re doing it right. If your knowledge makes people feel small, stupid, or afraid to ask questions—something has gone sideways, and it’s worth examining.
Having achieved every certification available to me in my field, I can tell you with complete honesty: I am not smarter than the people I serve. I have specific training that they don’t, and they have specific experience that I don’t. The magic happens where those two things meet—not where one of them dominates the other.
We’re all in this together. Every one of us—credentialed or not—is just a person trying to figure out how to be healthy in a world that doesn’t make it easy. A little more humility and a lot less gatekeeping would go a long way.
As always, I hope sharing these thoughts is helpful to someone—whether you’re a fellow practitioner, a client, or a person who’s been made to feel like your voice doesn’t matter in your own health journey. It does. It always has.
Rance Edwards is a National Board Certified Health and Wellness Coach (NBC-HWC) with over 2,000 clinical hours of experience, specializing in chronic disease management and lifestyle medicine.
Ready to work with someone who listens? If you’re looking for a health coach who treats you as a partner—not a patient to be managed—let’s talk.
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