I'm an ob-gyn — but I make more money countering health misinformation on TikTok

Yahoo

3 days ago

Meet Dr. Fran.
When ob-gyn Dr. Franziska Haydanek, aka Paging Dr. Fran, first started posting videos on TikTok, she wasn't trying to make money or get famous — she wanted to combat the misinformation about women's health that she kept seeing while scrolling online. What started as a side gig to help others has grown into a platform with more than 650K followers on TikTok alone. She's now earning triple her doctor's salary making these myth-busting and educational videos. In this interview with Yahoo's Rachel Grumman Bender, Dr. Fran shares in her own words how she got started, the reason she wants other doctors to join her on social media and why, despite her success, she'll never give up her day job as a doctor.
When I graduated from medical school in 2021, I took six months off to be home with my kids before I started my real job in a hospital. TikTok had blown up over the past couple of years. I'd been scrolling on it myself and kept seeing incorrect things about birth control, labor and delivery, pregnancy and breastfeeding — either people trying to mislead you or just people misunderstanding how things were. I was like, 'Well, I feel like someone should address this. I've got nothing but time.' So I started making videos. I had a couple thousand followers — not that big of a deal.
And then in early 2022, when the Dobbs decision was leaked [overturning Roe v. Wade, which had guaranteed the right to abortion on a federal level], I was in a Facebook group with a bunch of ob-gyn moms, and we were talking about how we can help people. We created this list within our own private Facebook group of doctors who would be willing to tie younger patients' tubes [known as tubal ligation, which prevents pregnancy]. So I was like, well, this list doesn't help anyone in this private Facebook group. So I asked if they would be willing to be in a public list, and then 150 of those doctors signed up — and that's how I created the TikTok tubal list [which now has thousands of doctors in the U.S. and beyond].
I posted it, and it went viral. I gained almost 100,000 followers in about a month. Then I just kept doing what I had been doing, addressing misinformation or clarifying things or just talking about things in medicine or being a mom in medicine. And here we are three years later.
The pros and cons of getting medical information online
Combating misinformation is the root of my whole platform, and it continues to be what I find the most rewarding. It's very important to me that I continue to show up, especially for ob-gyn. Our medicine is so deeply intertwined with politics and people's political and religious agendas, more than probably most other aspects of medicine. So I think it's really important that there's someone there who is saying what the actual evidence-based information is.
I hope people realize that sometimes the internet can be a really great source of information, but also they should take everything with a grain of salt. I always encourage people to use what they have available to them. So if using things like TikTok or Reddit or whatever is how they start to educate themselves about options, I think that should be highly encouraged. It's also why I encourage other doctors to make content because ours should really be the first one that people see.
But you can get really sucked into the wrong place. You don't know how to verify the information or if it applies to you and your health. So I think social media is a great place to start educating yourself, but then you really need to take it back to your own doctor and be like, "Hey, I saw this. Do you think this applies to me?" Or, "How does this affect my care?" Rather than just using a TikTok video to self-diagnose and then treat yourself.
'I tripled my income'
Everyone wants more information about the things that they're seeing online and in real life, so having someone lay it out for them in an easy-to-digest format is something that people really respond to. In 2023, I started making money from my videos, in addition to getting paid for views on TikTok and Instagram. Once in a while, I would have people reach out like, "Hey, will you talk about this dry shampoo you're already using?' or, 'Hey, we're trying to promote this over-the-counter COVID test." And I was like, "Yeah, sure" — that all aligns with what I'm doing. By the time we got to early 2024, I found it very overwhelming to be a full-time doctor and a mother while managing all these things [with social media]. So I signed with a management company that now does all of that for me.
In 2024, I tripled my income from the previous year. At this point in 2025, I've already surpassed what I made in 2024. So it's just been steadily growing, and we're focusing on long-term partnerships with people and companies that I really believe in. I'm very selective of who I work with. I decline probably about 90% of the things that come my way because they don't all align with my views or what I believe in medically or personally. But I get to work with companies that I do believe in, and it's been really rewarding.
Making more money has been very nice because as doctors you put off about 10 years of financial income. In addition, I still have a lot of student loans I'm working off. My husband is also a doctor and has student loans. So it was nice because it just let us ramp up our emergency fund. It let us create savings accounts that we hadn't had in our mid-30s, which most people start in their mid-20s. It has given us more of a financial safety net.
I've always said — even back before I ever went to medical school and I was making some money from social media — that the platform is fickle and there's no guarantee that the money will still be there tomorrow. So, for me, I've always considered this a nice supplement to my normal income, but I would never give up my real job for this.
I love what I do, and I love being able to take care of patients in real life. I'll probably cut back just a little bit on my hours because I do work a lot and I have three young children. I want to have some flexibility for that. So my long-term goals are to keep doing what I'm doing, being a source of truth for people and still making it interesting.
This has been edited for length and clarity.
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