A Message to Coaches and Wellness Practitioners Who Are Tired of Proving Themselves to People Who Were Never Listening

I see it constantly—a health coach or wellness practitioner shares something grounded, thoughtful, and rooted in real experience, and within hours, the comments section turns into a courtroom.

“Are you a doctor?”

“What qualifies you to speak on this?”

“You shouldn’t be giving medical advice.”

If you’ve been in this space long enough, you know the feeling. Your stomach drops a little. You start composing a response in your head—pulling up your certifications, your clinical hours, the research you’ve read—and somewhere between the second and third paragraph of your reply, you realize something that took me a long time to learn:

Most of the time, they weren’t asking.

Recognizing the question that isn’t a question

There’s a massive difference between someone who genuinely wants to understand your qualifications and someone who’s using a question as a weapon. The first person is curious; they want context so they can evaluate what you’re saying on its merits. That person deserves a thoughtful response, and I’ll get to what that can look like in a moment.

The second person has already decided. They’ve already made up their mind that you’re a fraud, a grifter, or someone who’s overstepping—and the question isn’t an invitation to explain yourself. It’s a trap door. No amount of credentials, clinical hours, or evidence is going to satisfy someone whose goal isn’t understanding; it’s demolition.

In my experience, the tell is usually in the tone and context. Someone who genuinely wants to know your background tends to ask privately, or they phrase it with some good faith—“I’m curious about your training” or “what’s your background in this area?” Someone who leads with “are you even a doctor?” in a public comment section, dripping with condescension, isn’t gathering information. They’re performing.

Learning to tell the difference has saved me more energy than almost any other professional skill I’ve developed.

Different end goals, same conversation

Here’s the thing that made this click for me: when you’re sharing health education and someone attacks your right to share it, you and that person are not in the same conversation. You showed up to educate; they showed up to win. You’re operating from a place of service—trying to give people information that might help them make better decisions about their own health. They’re operating from a place of ego, ideology, or just the dopamine hit that comes from tearing someone down on the internet.

When two people in a conversation have fundamentally different objectives, no meaningful exchange can happen. It’s like trying to have a discussion about nutrition with someone who came to argue about politics; the words might overlap, but the intentions never will.

I’ve watched coaches I deeply respect get pulled into hour-long comment threads trying to justify themselves to someone who was never going to be convinced—and all it did was drain them, distract them from the people they’re actually helping, and give the attacker exactly the reaction they wanted.

Sometimes the most powerful response is no response at all.

Not all attacks need defending

This is the hardest part, and I want to be direct about it: walking away from an attack can feel like losing. It can feel like you’re letting someone publicly discredit you while your audience watches. Every instinct says to fight back, to prove them wrong, to defend the work you’ve poured years into.

I get it. I’ve been there.

What I’ve learned, though, is that the people who matter—the ones in your audience who are actually paying attention, who have benefited from your content, who are watching how you carry yourself—they can usually see exactly what’s happening. They can see that the attacker isn’t engaging in good faith. They can see that you’re being baited. And more often than not, your silence communicates more confidence and professionalism than a five-paragraph defense ever could.

The person attacking you is, in most cases, completely irrelevant to your success and your effectiveness at helping people improve their health. They’re not your client. They’re not your patient. They’re probably not even your target audience. They’re a stranger on the internet who has decided that your existence in this space is a personal offense to them—and engaging with that energy doesn’t serve you or the people who actually need what you offer.

Not every accusation requires a defense. Not every challenge to your credibility requires proof. Sometimes the proof is in the outcomes, in the people whose lives have changed, in the body of work you’ve built—and none of that needs to be submitted as evidence in someone’s comment-section tribunal.

When it is worth engaging

All of that said, there are rare moments when a response is the right move—and I don’t want to dismiss those entirely.

If someone seems genuinely receptive, if their tone suggests confusion rather than hostility, if they seem like they’re reachable—that can be a real opportunity. Not everyone who questions your qualifications is attacking you; some people genuinely don’t understand what a health coach does, what the training involves, or how the profession fits into the broader healthcare landscape. They’re asking because nobody has ever explained it to them.

In those cases, real experience is your most powerful tool. Not defensiveness—experience. If you’ve worked with real people, tracked real outcomes, sat across from real patients navigating real health challenges, that carries weight. You don’t need to be a doctor to have helped someone lower their blood pressure through dietary changes. You don’t need an MD to have walked a client through the process of getting off a medication their physician agreed they no longer needed. You need experience, competence, and a genuine commitment to working within your scope—and if you have those things, they speak for themselves.

Here’s what I’d lean on, in the rare cases where engaging feels worthwhile:

  • Your clinical hours and the outcomes you’ve observed firsthand—not in theory, in practice, with real people
  • Your credentials and what they actually mean—for NBC-HWCs, that includes a credentialing process developed in partnership with the National Board of Medical Examiners
  • The collaborative nature of your work—you’re not replacing anyone’s doctor; you’re the bridge between a care plan and the daily behavior change that makes it work
  • The evidence base for health coaching as an intervention—there’s a growing body of research supporting what we do, and it’s worth being familiar with the broad strokes even if you never cite a study in a comment thread

Keep it brief, keep it grounded, and don’t get pulled into a back-and-forth. Say your piece, share the context, and move on. If they respond in good faith, great—you’ve just educated someone. If they come back swinging, you’ll know the first instinct was right, and you can walk away with a clear conscience.

Health information is not medical advice

This one deserves its own section because I see it constantly, and the distinction genuinely matters—both legally and practically.

When a health coach shares educational content about nutrition, supplementation, sleep hygiene, stress management, or any other lifestyle factor, they are sharing health information. Health information is educational; it’s general knowledge intended to help people make more informed decisions about their own lives. Doctors share health information. Nurses share health information. Registered dietitians share health information. Authors, researchers, journalists, and—yes—health coaches share health information. It’s protected speech, and it’s a fundamental part of public health literacy.

Medical advice is something entirely different. Medical advice is individualized clinical guidance directed at a specific person based on their specific health history, labs, imaging, and diagnosis. It involves a clinical assessment, a patient-provider relationship, and—critically—a scope of practice that includes diagnosing and prescribing.

Health coaches don’t do that, and reputable ones aren’t trying to. When I share a post about the relationship between processed seed oils and inflammation, I’m not diagnosing anyone with anything; I’m sharing health information that the reader can evaluate, discuss with their own provider, and apply—or not apply—as they see fit. That’s health education, and it’s not only legal, it’s essential.

The conflation of health information with medical advice is one of the most common—and most damaging—misunderstandings I see online. It’s used as a weapon to silence practitioners who are sharing legitimate, evidence-informed health education, and it fundamentally misrepresents what we do. It also, ironically, contributes to the very health illiteracy that makes people so vulnerable to misinformation in the first place; when you discourage non-physicians from educating the public, you don’t eliminate health information—you just leave people with fewer trustworthy sources of it.

We didn’t choose this path to play doctor

Something I want to remind every wellness coach and practitioner reading this: most of us are not in this space because we failed to become conventional medical practitioners. We’re here because we chose this—deliberately, intentionally, often after watching the conventional system fail the people we care about.

Many of us don’t want to be doctors. Not because we don’t respect the profession—I have enormous respect for physicians—but because the conventional system has structural limitations that we wanted to address from a different angle. Doctors see patients for minutes at a time. They’re operating inside a system that was built for acute care and has been stretched—often past its breaking point—to handle chronic disease. They don’t have the time to sit with someone for an hour, understand their life, their stress, their relationships, their dietary patterns, their sleep habits, and their emotional relationship with food. That’s not a knock on them; it’s a structural limitation of how the system works.

We exist in that gap. We chose to work in it because we believe people deserve more than a printout and a prescription. We believe that understanding someone—genuinely meeting them where they are—is a prerequisite for helping them change, and that the 15-minute appointment model makes that nearly impossible.

The next time someone asks you what qualifies you to speak on health topics, remember that you’re not an imposter filling a role you weren’t meant for. You’re a professional who chose a specific path because you saw a need that wasn’t being met—and you decided to meet it. Your training, your experience, your continued education, and the outcomes you’ve helped people achieve are real. They don’t evaporate because a stranger on the internet decided they don’t count.

Protect your energy for the people who need it

I’ll close with something I remind myself of regularly, because this work can be emotionally taxing in ways that people outside of it don’t always understand.

Every minute you spend defending yourself to someone who has already decided you’re worthless is a minute you’re not spending on the client who’s terrified about their new diabetes diagnosis. It’s a minute you’re not spending researching a complicated case. It’s a minute you’re not spending writing the next piece of content that might reach someone at exactly the right moment.

Your energy is finite, and the people who need you—the ones who are confused, scared, overwhelmed, and looking for someone who will actually listen to them—they need you operating at full capacity. They don’t care about your comment-section battles. They care about whether you can help them.

So help them. Let the noise be noise. Show up for the work, show up for your clients, show up for the people who are quietly watching your content and slowly building the courage to reach out. That’s where the impact lives—not in proving yourself to someone who was never going to be convinced anyway.

You don’t owe them an explanation. You owe yourself and your clients your best energy.

As always, I hope this gives another coach, clinician, or self-healer some clarity and direction.

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.

If you landed here out of curiosity about what health coaches actually do and how they’re different from doctors—that’s exactly the kind of question worth exploring. If you’re navigating a health challenge and wondering whether someone who has the time to actually listen and walk alongside you might help, a short conversation is all it takes to find out; if it’s not the right fit, I’ll tell you that too. Let’s have a conversation →

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