A surgeon told me something recently that I keep thinking about.
He’s not new to private practice. But the numbers aren’t where he expected them to be. The GMI period is ending. The hospital, he said without bitterness, is making a business decision: bringing in another surgeon even though his own schedule isn’t full.
He watched his colleagues start posting educational videos. Saw the engagement. Decided he should try. So he did.
“I don’t enjoy it,” he told me. “It feels forced. I’m a clinician. I operate. I’m not someone who talks alone to a camera.”
He said it matter-of-factly. Not complaining. Just stating something he had come to accept as a personal limitation, another thing private practice was asking of him that he hadn’t signed up for.
I told him that patient acquisition isn’t only digital. And digital doesn’t only mean social media. There are channels that have nothing to do with a camera, an algorithm or a content calendar.
He looked up. The kind of look that comes when someone has been carrying something they didn’t need to carry, and someone finally tells them they can put it down.
The assumption nobody questions
The default advice for a surgeon trying to grow a private practice has become predictable. Get on social media. Post videos. Build an audience. It’s repeated so often it has started to sound like fact.
It’s not wrong advice. For surgeons who genuinely enjoy it, who find the format natural and have something they want to say, content compounds over time. A real voice builds a real following. That’s worth pursuing for the surgeon it fits.
But content is a long game. It needs consistency, genuine interest and the kind of energy an audience can feel through a screen.
When it’s forced, when the surgeon is recording because he feels he has to and not because he wants to, that comes through too. Audiences feel the difference. So does the surgeon making it.
And it starts from an assumption that deserves to be questioned: that the only way to be found is to be seen.
It’s not.
Three paths that don’t need a camera
1. The intent moment
There are two stages in a patient’s journey. Awareness, where the patient discovers you exist. And intent, where the patient has already decided they need a specialist and is now searching for one.
Social media lives in the awareness stage. Google lives in the intent stage.
The patient with a hernia, a knee that needs attention, a lump that needs investigating, isn’t scrolling through content waiting to discover a surgeon. They’re searching, actively, with intent. What they find in that moment (your Google profile, your reviews, what previous patients said) is what turns a searcher into a patient.
You don’t need to be on camera for that. You need to be findable when it matters.
2. The corporate room
His hospital has insurance panel agreements with companies. Those companies have employees who are covered, and who will eventually need a specialist.
Most surgeons wait for the hospital to arrange a health talk or a corporate wellness event. That can take months, if it happens at all.
He doesn’t have to wait. With his hospital’s agreement, and most hospitals support educational initiatives, he can offer a health talk to companies on the panel. A surgeon speaking to a room of fifty employees about a condition relevant to his specialty isn’t selling. That’s a clinician being useful to people who might one day need him.
3. The GP relationship
The traditional referral pathway still works. But it has to be maintained, not assumed.
A GP who referred once and received good feedback will refer again. A GP who hasn’t heard from the surgeon since the last referral will refer to whoever comes to mind first.
One genuine check-in. One update on a mutual patient. One CME event attended together. These aren’t grand gestures. They’re the small, consistent actions that keep a name at the front of a referring doctor’s mind.
The honest close
Social media is a tool. For some surgeons it’s the right tool. For others it’s the wrong starting point entirely.
What matters is not which channel you choose. It’s that you choose deliberately, based on where your patients actually are and what kind of presence you can build honestly and consistently.
You don’t have to talk to a camera. But you do have to build something.
One milligram at a time.