Medical Content Policy

Effective Date: June 2026

1. Why a separate policy

Medical content carries unique risk: bad advice can hurt people. This policy sets the bar for any medical claim, recommendation, prescription, or educational explanation posted on Doctotalk.

2. Disclaimer

All medical content on the Platform — whether in a consultation, prescription, video, or caption — is for the information of the individual receiving it, and is not a substitute for an in-person examination by a qualified physician. Educational videos are general information only and do not constitute personal medical advice.

3. What's not allowed

• Claims that a treatment "cures" cancer, diabetes, HIV/AIDS, or any chronic disease for which no verified cure exists.
• Guaranteed-result claims ("100% effective", "works every time").
• Promotion of prescription-only medication to the general public.
• Misleading before/after imagery without context or disclosure.
• Recommending dosages or treatment plans for conditions that require in-person evaluation.
• Content that contradicts established public-health guidance (WHO, ICMR, MoHFW India) without clearly disclosing it as a minority view.

4. Caption / claim text filter

Doctotalk operates an admin-editable blocklist of medical-claim phrases. Videos whose title or description match a blocklisted phrase are either flagged for admin review or rejected at upload, depending on the phrase's severity. Three lifetime flags push a doctor into mandatory pre-publish review.

5. Prescriptions

• Prescriptions must be based on a documented consultation with the patient.
• Doctors must not prescribe medications that are unsafe to prescribe over teleconsultation.
• All prescriptions are digitally signed and stored as PDFs with a verifiable signature.

6. Reporting unsafe content

Anyone — doctor or patient — may report medical content they believe is unsafe by tapping Report on the video, profile, or chat. Reports involving immediate risk to life are escalated immediately.

7. Automated content moderation

To help us enforce this policy at scale, Doctotalk runs automated checks on every doctor video at upload time. The checks operate entirely on our own infrastructure — no video, frame, or thumbnail is sent to a third-party API. Specifically:

• NSFW image classification on the auto-generated poster and a small set of sampled frames, to detect adult or sexually explicit imagery.
• Optical character recognition (OCR) on the thumbnail, so any medical claim text printed on the image is matched against the same admin-curated blocklist that scans the video title and description.

A scan that crosses our risk threshold places the video in pre-publish review until a human moderator approves or rejects it. A scan that falls in the warning band is published but flagged for moderator follow-up. Doctors are notified by email and in-app when either happens, and may appeal as described in Section 5 of the Community Guidelines. Automated checks never override a human moderator's decision and are not used to make decisions about a doctor's account, billing, or eligibility to consult.