On a quiet evening, I was scrolling through my Instagram. A reel, from a Medical Creator, popped up which said, “Are you a medico and broke ? Then follow me to fix your situation”. The clickbait was strong, featuring an AI-generated image of a frustrated doctor. I get curious when big claims are made, so I watched it whole. The reel covered creating an emergency fund, mutual funds suitable for medical professionals, and the need for term and health insurance. The reel ended, and the caption concluded with “follow to know more”.
After a few reels, another finance influencer, this time a CA professional, explained how a layperson can read the balance sheet of a listed hospital chain company that had announced its quarterly results. He explained how the results affected the EBITDA and P/E ratios and how the company plans to expand. This reel also ended with “follow to know more” with an additional CTA to write the word ‘health’ in the comments, to which he would send his notes.
Before I closed Instagram, I came across another reel claiming that AI will replace doctors, especially Radiologists, and that OpenAI and Anthropic have launched health data ventures that will take over medical professionals soon [with loud music]. It also said “AI may not replace you, but someone with AI will definitely”. I shut down Instagram for the day and began thinking.
Daily, we all watch reels and posts centred on topics like personal finance, economics, business events, and, more recently, AI in healthcare. The ads nowadays are highly targeted, so you all must have come across the content around some, if not all, of these topics. Even on LinkedIn, we see thousands of AI-assisted [if not generated] posts claiming to teach you one thing or the other, demanding a following. If you are interested, the algorithm may be pushing more of these.
Most often, when it comes to consuming such social media content, we see it as something we would apply right away or save to view later [hardly revisit]. Neither serves any meaningful purpose or actionable value. It is nice for entertainment or as an occasional reality check. The real issues among many are as follows
- Individual-level relevance of the content
- Exaggerated claims about risk, returns and scope.
- The duration of the reel allows only surface scratching
- Content Creator’s absence of understanding around what counts as educating vs what is fledged advising [doing the latter without a license is a punishable offence],
- Authority bias
Let’s talk about the first reel I mentioned above. There is absolutely no “wrong information” as such in the content of that reel. The problem, though, starts when general content is pushed with the intent of monetising it as advice. Misleading information is a more serious issue than fake information. Fake information can be googled and fact-checked very easily, but misleading information often contains half-truths taken out of context, which even a language model like ChatGPT would not refute in full. Temptations that such content generates make even the smartest people indulge in it. While I was collecting relevant information, I researched hundreds of scams in newspapers in which medical personnel were defrauded. I then tried to find common threads, such as how the scams are arranged, how the prey is discovered, and how the fraud finally unfolds. That was step 1
In the second reel mentioned above, the creator certainly holds credentials and can be a source of good content. Now, the issue on our side is that we don’t know the terms needed to understand the content in the context he is explaining. So even the most basic information in economics sounds like some secret knowledge to us.
After step 1, I started talking with my friends, my seniors and the other medics about how they manage their personal finances and if they experienced any such frauds themselves. I also had long conversations with multiple people who had recently started their medical practice and the issues they faced. Many of the problems revolved around the inability to understand the economics of medical practice and the efficient utilisation of funds. While talking, I made sure to include people from different economic backgrounds to see how they view it from their unique perspectives. This brings us to the question of credibility.
Logically, the whole point of getting credentials is to send a message that “I know the stuff I am doing, a legal government entity has certified me for the same, and this makes me accountable for the advice I give “. So, in the absence of credentials, all one can do is educate with a clear disclaimer. But this requires absolute honesty, and that is sadly rare these days. So I started to look for practical solutions. My goal was to understand what the issue is, where the gap lies and how I can contribute if I can. So I took it up as my personal curriculum and began my work. It included mainstream finance books, health economics, reports and studies from around the world, and much more, which I thought was relevant. I called this work the Foramen of Finance [find out why]. And through this, we would be trying to address –
- Common scams targeted at medical professionals and precautions to take.
- Spotting exaggerated claims in the feed
- Learning the bare minimum of financial concepts and economic principles that kick-starts your personalised journey.
- Addressing the new sensational stuff in the world of artificial intelligence, health economics, and important legal and technological advancements through a logical lens.
- Creating all this in a language friendly to the medicos.
Creating long-form text-based content in today’s world is a tough task. However, I did not see a more structured way to present all the work I wanted to present. So the best thing that was possible was to have a space that was neatly structured, hence I built this website. At present, I have no incentive to push any product, and I do not plan to monetise this in the near future. There is only a preliminary idea of how this website would function, as explained in the Start here section. Feel free to check out the website as I will start organising it.
To spread the content of the website, an Instagram page – FORAMEN OF FINANCE of the same name has been created. You can follow the page to stay updated about upcoming content. Apart from that, FOF [foramen of finance] has no social media presence.
PS – I don’t buy the logic of becoming an expert in anything purely from a masterclass, social media, or any WhatsApp or Telegram group. There is no substitute for good books, structured concepts and practical application over and over again when it comes to finance. If anyone claims otherwise, either he is lying and on his way to committing fraud, or he is naive enough and has yet to face reality.