Do Not Confuse Visibility With Credibility

By Tina Chagoury, Clinical Dietitian · 5 min read · 2026-10-19

Good lighting and strong marketing are not the same as years of education and clinical training. Here is how to tell the difference.

People appear online and speak about whatever they like, in medicine and in fields entirely outside their own, without a licence, without a qualification and without experience. And people believe them.

Who needs years of education, clinical training and continuing research when you have a very specific personal experience, good lighting and excellent marketing?

Why this matters more in women's health than almost anywhere

Women in the Arab region in particular struggle to find accurate information connecting their health, their nutrition and the natural therapeutic options available to them.

They are lost. They do not know where to search. They do not know whether what they have heard is correct or not.

That gap is exactly what confident, unqualified content fills.

How to evaluate someone

Look for actual qualifications, and check them. Not a certificate from a weekend course. A recognised degree, a licence to practise, and continuing professional education.

Ask whether they stay inside their scope. This is the clearest signal there is. I am a clinical dietitian. I do not prescribe hormone therapy, I do not advise on it and I do not manage it. That belongs with a gynaecologist. Someone who claims authority across every domain at once has authority in none of them.

Notice whether they say "it depends". Real clinical answers are conditional, because people differ. Anyone who has one protocol for every woman is selling, not advising.

Notice whether they promise certainty, particularly in areas where certainty does not exist: fertility, cancer, cures.

Notice whether they cite anything. And whether what they cite says what they claim.

Notice whether they tell you what they cannot do. Nutrition supports medical treatment. It does not replace it. Anyone unwilling to say that is not being honest with you.

Lived experience is not the opposite of expertise

I want to be fair here, because this cuts both ways.

Who said trained experts have not had lived experiences that shaped their practice and refined their work? I specialised in women's hormonal health after my own experience with breast cancer and treatment induced early menopause. That experience did not take me away from the science. It made me respect physiology considerably more.

The problem is not personal experience. The problem is personal experience presented as though it generalises to everyone, without the training to know when it does not.

Why I started speaking publicly at all

For a long time I did not. I would hear something being said that I knew was wrong, and think: who am I going to reach? I have two or three thousand followers. Who will hear me?

Then I reframed it. If one woman, or one person, or one child benefits, that is enough. Imagine sitting in a room with a thousand people and telling them this. That is what a post is.

If you know that what is being said is wrong, say so. That is the whole reason I became consistent about it.

The practical filter

Before you act on health information you have seen online, ask three questions:

1. Is this person qualified in the specific thing they are discussing?

2. Are they staying inside their scope, and do they say where it ends?

3. Are they describing what worked for them, or what the evidence supports for people like me?

Visibility is not credibility. They are frequently inversely related.

This article is nutrition education, not medical advice.

Tina Chagoury is a licensed clinical dietitian who graduated from the American University of Beirut in 2002 with a degree in nutritional sciences and completed a Master of Public Health in 2005. She has practised clinical nutrition for over twenty years. She is the creator of the Hormone Reset Method™. Learn more and start here.