I write, edit, and research content in the field of health written under the guidance of practitioners.
These practitioners include a Holistic Health Coach, a Registered Dietician, an Acupuncture Physician, a Doctor of Oriental Medicine, a Certified Personal Trainer, and a Holistic Health Practitioner.
Where my content appears, and there is an author bio, we use one of the practitioner’s bylines.
In my situation, my name not appearing on my work is one part liability and one part related to how Google delivers results for a search query.
Both of the above is important for what it means to be a health writer.
E-A-T: Being an Expert for Google
I am starting with Google for two reasons. First, you will rarely produce content that Google won’t index at some point. Second, Google provides a fundamental set of guidelines related to ranking that helps us understand how to be a health writer.
Let’s talk about E-A-T.
E-A-T stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Google’s Quality Raters’ Guidelines tell us that E-A-T is very important in helping to determine where your content will rank in search, especially when the content on that webpage can impact a person’s “happiness, health, financial stability, or safety.”
What SEO experts who have delved into the 172-page Quality Raters’ Guidelines document tell us is that Google wants content to be authored by people with a relevant degree, certification, or experience. That means if you publish an article about “Tylenol Usage in People With Liver Disease,” the credited author should probably have “M.D.” or a related degree in the author byline.
This poses a real challenge for health writers like me who don’t have a life sciences degree or experience in a clinical setting.
If the ericmazzoni.com domain was more established and had some authority in SEO, writing, or editing, even if I tried to rank an article about Tylenol and created innovative content that was beloved by all, there would be a strong possibility that Google would never display the page anywhere in the top 100 of search results.
Does this mean that operations publishing health content should be hiring a medical professional to write this content? Yes, if they can. But for many operations, the cost of hiring a medical professional to write is entirely cost-prohibitive.
Looking around at the top ranked domains in the health space, we see places like Healthline.com showing medical professionals having “checked” or “approved” the published article. Are these medical professionals on staff, or are they on some sort of retainer to lend their names to articles? I would guess the latter, but I have no idea.
Where I work, the company had discussed hiring a freelance nutritionist to write articles. This worried me because I figured I would be out of a job soon.
However, certified nutritionists were looking for an excess of $1,000 to write a single blog post. If you are a certified nutritionist, you have the potential to earn a decent six-figure income in your practice, so the high cost for their time to write an article makes sense.
This is where health writers derive their value. We are, in a sense, “playing doctor” and helping to fill in the gaps between the business and the name on the byline.
When you get into health writing, you face great scrutiny, not only from Google, but also from the health professional whose name might appear on the article.
As the writer, if you get lazy or careless, it could reflect poorly on many people and your business. Perhaps worse than that, if some detail in the article is wrong, and a reader makes a decision based on what they read, they could hurt themselves.
Still interested in health writing?
Great, let’s keep going.
Categories of Health Writing
I have used the term “health writer” because it is the main keyword that came up when researching ideas for this article. Health writer is also a catch-all to describe someone who can write articles about diet, exercise, supplements, medical conditions, drugs, etc.
Here are some other names for health writers:
- Nutrition writer
- Diet writer
- Wellness writer
- Exercise and Fitness writer
- Pharmaceutical writer
- Medical writer
Do we need to make a distinction between these categories? Are they different?
Suppose you take a job writing an exercise article. In that case, you are more likely to concern yourself with the particular issues of the people you are writing for – protein intake, correct form for a specific exercise routine, and recovery after a workout. Your content might be casual, full of anecdotes, and encourage reader with an uplifting message. The great thing about these articles is that there isn’t an exacting science when it comes to every area of fitness. For example, you could write that 5 sets of 12 reps at a lower weight is superior to 3 sets of 6 reps at a higher weight. There may be a disagreement around which is more correct, but there is no harm done with either suggestion.
Compare that to taking a job as a pharmaceutical writer. For this job, there is a great potential for harm. If you were to flub anything, it could reflect horribly on the company, product, and you as a writer. It might even get you into trouble with the FDA, SEC, investors, and the media.
Whether writing fitness articles or sending out a press release for a new pharmaceutical product, we need a writer. But the skills necessary to do well in either job are very different.
Clearly, “health writer” is a bit reductive in describing the profession. A health writer should be able to adapt to the requirements of each job. But not all health writers will necessarily be a good fit for all jobs.
Be Humble Because You Don’t Know
Health writing is much like any other writing.
You start with a topic, conduct research, develop an outline, write the content, and then go through several rounds of edits.
That is all standard. But we must remember we are writing for Google and “ghostwriting” for a professional. So we are trying to be an expert while not being one. As a result, you have to choose your words carefully.
I worked in a newsroom for three years, so going into my current position I had the understanding that you always need to source any claims you make. For example, even if you have a video showing a guy hit his wife, until he is convicted, you could never say “the defendant hit his wife.” Instead, you could say, “the defendant has been charged with domestic battery,” or, “Bob is being investigated for striking his wife.”
This can be hard for some writers to grapple with. I have worked with freelance writers who are surprised when I cut so much of their work or need chunks of their article rewritten. Before working with us, even if the freelance writer had written for the health space, it is often clear that their previous editors had been much more lax or didn’t understand why it was ill-advised to allow certain language or phrasing.
So how do you write well as a health writer? A big part of it is experience. The other part is that most of what you think you know about health is… not entirely correct.
Let’s use vitamin C as an example. Vitamin C is great for colds and the immune system, and getting a ton of it each day will keep you healthy, right?
Hmm, no. Not at all. Or at least it is more complicated than that.
If you have an article about vitamin C to write, you might begin a Google search with “vitamin c prevents colds.”
Except, the top results for this search don’t support this claim. But as a health writer, I was going to write about cold prevention, so what do I do now?
What I would do is read the top result on Google, which in this case is a research article from the Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care, out of Cologne, Germany, titled Common colds: Does vitamin C keep you healthy?
The researchers who published this article analyzed 29 studies that included more than 11,000 children and adults who regularly used a supplement containing 200 to 1,000 milligrams of vitamin C and compared that to a product that did not contain any active ingredient.
This analysis revealed that taking vitamin C each day, in any quantity, over a long period, did not prevent colds; however, it did shorten the length of colds by 10 percent, and symptoms were milder. Importantly, taking vitamin C after becoming ill did not shorten the length of colds in men and women.
While vitamin C won’t prevent colds, taking vitamin C as a preventative measure was shown in one of the studies to reduce the risk of a cold by 50 percent when taken two to three weeks before strenuous physical activity in cold temperatures.
Look at the three paragraphs above. That is 141 words that summarized a research paper about the effect of vitamin C on colds. As a health writer, I started with a presumption that vitamin C prevents colds but found that it doesn’t.
I’m glad it turned out this way because the article will be much more interesting and I learned a few things.
Much of my job is exactly the above. Start with an idea, do research, and then figure out if the angle is correct. If not, I will change it. In fact, throughout the writing process, this happens a lot.
This should show you that curiosity to always be seeking out the fact of the matter about any topic is crucial. Those with strong biases need not apply.
Here is a common health proverb that demonstrates this curiosity at work: “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.”
But why does an apple do this? Your next question should be, “what ingredients or compounds might be contained within the apple that keeps you from having to see a doctor?”
A curious mind will investigate apples, the vitamins, minerals, fiber, and other constituents found in them, and perhaps even the impact of pesticides, GMOs, storage methods, growing season, and make a comparison between different species of apples.
Along with curiosity, it helps to know how to find and navigate studies. I’m not going to delve into that here. Other resources do a better job of explaining studies, the jargon, reading data, and so forth.
I suggest bookmarking the National Center for Biotechnology Information website for research. You can also find studies through Google Scholar by performing a simple search query, such as “nutrients in apples.” If a study is blocked behind a paywall, simply paste the link into https://sci-hub.se; though you should only do this for your own research and never actually reference anything you pulled from the site unless you have licensed the study or have permission to use it.
For great examples of how to write health articles and cite research well, check out Healthline.com, which currently dominates Google search results. Any .edu or .gov is also advisable.
What to Know About FDA Regulations
When writing about health, you may find yourself writing about a product regulated by the FDA.
The FDA regulates supplements as food, except where it concerns supplements with ingredients that may have been derived from an ingredient that was developed for a drug – I can’t think of examples right now, but I have seen them.
Homeopathics are another exception. We can’t call a homeopathic product a supplement. We refer to them only as a “product” or “formula.”
Pharmaceuticals are regulated differently then either of these.
Regarding health writing in general, I think it is beneficial to understand how the FDA regulates supplements. I’m going to keep things simple here, but you can dig through the FDA website if you want more insight.
The FDA guidelines help us to understand what we can and can not say. Much like Google helps us be smart about our decisions before we ever start writing an article.
When discussing health claims, the FDA demands we avoid phrasing that suggests or implies a “change of state” or “disease claim.”
Let’s go back to our vitamin C example. A mountain of scientific research says vitamin C is an antioxidant and plays a role in how the immune system functions. So a vitamin C supplement could say “supports the immune system.” To be extra safe, we might say “may support a healthy immune system.” Meaning that an immune system that is already functioning well (it is healthy) would neither be improved nor worsened by vitamin C.
But we don’t want to say that “the 500 mg of vitamin C in this product is the correct amount to support the immune system.” We can’t claim any amount of any ingredient is appropriate for any biological function without evidence.
However, we know the established recommended daily allowance (RDA) for certain nutrients. For a male older than 19, the RDA of vitamin C is 90 milligrams; 75 milligrams for women. So if the product has 500 milligrams of vitamin C, you can say that “this vitamin C product provides more than the daily recommended RDA of vitamin C.”
Are the RDA recommendations accurate? Is 500 milligrams of vitamin C a good amount for a healthy immune system? We have no idea. We only know what has being established as being “recommended.” It could be more or less than this. As such, we should not make any definitive claims.
Let’s change our vitamin C ingredient and see what happens. Suppose the vitamin C product provides vitamin C in liposomal form. In that case, you could say that “liposomal vitamin C is more bioavailable and absorbable than some other forms of vitamin C.”
There is research supporting the bioavailability and absorption claim, so you are generally good to go; however, you could argue the research is not settled. If you reread what I wrote, I am making a non-specific (weak) claim about absorption compared to “some forms of vitamin C.” If I had said that “you will absorb 40 times more vitamin C if you take this product,” then we might get in trouble.
Then we come to diseases. In some research, vitamin C has been found to regulate the inflammatory response in the immune system. High levels of inflammation are attributed to a greater risk of developing certain diseases, including cancer and Alzheimer’s.
Does that mean we can say “vitamin C reduces your risk of cancer?” If you found a peer-reviewed, double-blind study that is frequently cited, and you get approval from your editor to use that language, maybe you would write that. But I would advise only citing where the researchers have made a clear statement linking vitamin C to a reduced risk of cancer or Alzheimer’s.
When it comes to disease claims, never make your own conclusions based on data presented in the study.
Alternatively, you might find that writing “vitamin C supports a healthy inflammatory response in the immune system” is slightly less concerning. It still toes the line, though. The reason for that is because the FDA recognizes that consumers might attribute inflammation to cancer. So if we say “anti-inflammatory,” we are basically saying “anti-cancer,” according to the FDA. The same goes for “anti-microbial” or “anti-viral,” which could be interpreted as curing the flu, preventing STDs, and any number of other things. That is why we normally stick with “supports a healthy immune system,” and we avoid saying “anti-” anything, unless we have a quote from someone who is qualified to make statements about inflammation.
While we are on this discussion of disease, how might we handle something less severe, like pain? For that we go to curcumin. Curcumin is widely regarded as one of the best herbal ingredients for pain relief from arthritis, headaches, injuries, etc. We can find some research that supports these claims.
So when talking about curcumin, you might say it “may provide temporary relief from occasional symptoms associated with pain.” The reason we say this is because we want to make it clear that while we know curcumin has been studied and used in association with pain, curcumin itself can not “improve” or “worsen” any condition, At the same time, we need to make sure that consumers are aware of the intended purpose of a product for pain.
If we weren’t allowed to say “immune,” “pain,” “respiratory system,” “focus,” and so forth, there would be a bunch of white bottles with ingredients listed on them and people won’t know what to take.
The caveat to all of this is that you might find yourself in a situation writing an article with the following sentence: “In some alternative medicine circles, chanting is a good method for detoxifying the body.”
To my knowledge, the FDA or any other governing body can’t or won’t raise concerns about someone claiming that chanting contributes to detoxification. If you are a doctor making this claim, you might have to answer to a medical board. Perhaps someone could sue you for harm if you told them not to get chemotherapy for cancer and just chant instead.
The FDA was Neutered
In 2016, the supplement industry went into panic mode when the FDA introduced regulations to more strictly control the text and images used by manufacturers so as not to suggest that a supplement has the potential to alter your health state, whether that is arthritis, cancer, or anything else. Many manufacturers thought the FDA would start sending out lawsuits and shut people down in mass. It turned out not to be as bad as we all thought.
What we learned is that the FDA lacks the resources to control the supplement market. It got worse when Trump moved to change how the FDA operates by cutting “red tape” in a bid to speed up the approval and development of potentially life-saving drugs. However, it should be noted that action began dropping significantly under Obama.
With the FDA weakened, more websites, manufacturers, and influencers have been publishing information about ingredients and products offering pain relief, stopping cancer, preventing dementia, making you stronger, etc.
When writing anything, you may be asked not to follow any guidelines. The content you write might be full of unsubstantiated or dangerous claims. Whether you follow through with the job is up to you. Just keep receipts of conversations, so if someone asks you about the sketchy claims made in the content you wrote, you can say that you had voiced your concern.
Are Health Writers in Demand?
Each year, new studies are published, therapies are practiced, drugs are developed, and the average age of the world’s population gets older and increasingly needs information about their health.
I don’t have statistics on health writers specifically, but according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment for writers and authors is projected to grow 9 percent from 2020 to 2030. Employment for technical writers is expected to grow 12 percent in the same period.
Along with a general upward trend in demand for writers and editors, there is a growing interest in the wellness market.
According to McKinsey Insights, the current wellness market is valued at $1.5 trillion. While the supplement market is expect to reach $128.64 billion by 2028 , according to Fortune Business Insights. While there is continued growth, competition between companies and influencers presents new challenges and opportunities.
Find Your Values in Health
You can be a health writer without caring about health in the same way you can write a murder mystery story without ever having put a body in a refrigerator that is buried in the woods behind 37th and Carrington.
A job is a job is a job. If you are timely, reliable, and accurate, then almost anyone should be able to become a health writer.
I was relatively healthy growing up. I was not allowed a lot of junk food or soda and I was active, so I was set up for success in adulthood. Granted, I have had my moments of making bad decisions. .
But as I have progressed in my career and learned more about health, a passion for living well woke inside of me, and I have found myself striving to be more consistent with my exercise, mindful of what goes into my body, and eager to get a good night’s rest.
My writing has benefited as a result. The passion I have for health often comes through in my articles.
Whatever your situation and reasons for getting into health writing, just remember that what you write will likely be read by someone who will take your content and live by it. Not to mention Google will be watching and will probably be happy to put your page in Google Jail if the algorithms deem it as not being worthy of the E-A-T criteria.
Health writing has a lot of opportunities. There is a lot to learn. If you are looking for a challenge to mix up your writing career, I can recommend giving it a go.
