What each route actually includes
DIY: you do ideation, scripting, filming, editing, captions, publishing, replying and reporting. Free in cash, six to ten hours a month once consistent, and the route that most often stops in month three. Freelancer: editing and perhaps filming. You remain the bottleneck for everything else, which is why this stalls almost as often as DIY.
In-house hire: availability and control, but one salary rarely buys a strategist, a bilingual writer, a videographer and an editor. Agency: positioning, calendar, filming, editing, both languages, publishing, community management, reporting. Compare quotes on those eight line items rather than on the headline number.
Selling products or courses alongside the clinic?
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The honest test
If you have six spare hours a month, enjoy the work, and can hold it through a busy quarter, DIY genuinely wins — and everything you need is published on this site for free. Most practising doctors discover in month three that they do not have those hours, and that discovery is the actual decision.
So do not decide now. Run it yourself for eight weeks and see. If it holds, keep the money. If it stops, you will know exactly which part broke, which makes the hiring decision straightforward instead of speculative.
When an agency is the wrong answer
When your reply system is broken — fix that first, it is cheaper and it improves every channel. When you have no capacity for more patients. When you are leaving within a year. When you want to be involved in every post, because the model only saves you time if you let it. And when the budget would be better spent on a second treatment room.
We decline work for those reasons regularly. It is not modesty — an engagement that starts with one of those unfixed produces a worse result and a client who is right to be unhappy.