White Coat Dispatchverified physician writing
a Techy Surgeon project
A folded white coat resting on a walnut table beside stacked papers and an open book
White Coat Dispatch

A verified directory · updated monthly

Doctors of
Substack

Every name here is a practising or formerly practising physician — MD, DO, or international equivalent — writing long-form under their own byline. Credentials are checked against the CMS national provider registry, not taken on faith.

▶  The story: two million subscribers →Nominate a physician writer →
Techy Surgeon New · A data story in six acts The Doctors of Substack: two million subscribers — and counting 111 physician writers · 92 NPI-verified · 2,002,211 readers reached — narrated by Techy Surgeon Experience the story →

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What are the doctors of Substack writing?

Three ways into the same 110 writers. Every view filters the directory below — click a bubble, a node, or a bar.

Every publication, sized by readership

Bubble area is proportional to subscribers. Hover for the writer, click to open their card. Oxblood marks Rising Stars — the under-1,000 cohort a floor would have erased.

Established Emerging Rising Star Count not public

Nominate a physician writer

Inclusion is free and always will be. There is no subscriber floor — what we check is that you are who you say you are. Nominate yourself or someone whose writing deserves readers. Every entry is NPI-verified and approved by its author before it goes live.

Submissions land in a review queue. US credentials are matched against the CMS NPPES registry; international credentials against the national register. Nothing is published without the physician's sign-off.

Method, and what this is not

Verification here means one narrow thing: this person holds the medical credential they claim. It is a check on identity, not on the quality, accuracy or safety of anything they write. A verified badge is not an endorsement of any clinical claim, and inclusion is not a recommendation to follow medical advice found in a newsletter. Physicians disagree with each other, sometimes sharply, and several people on this list hold views others here would dispute. That is what a directory of independent writers looks like.

Reach figures come from public Substack profile data. They are approximate, they move constantly, and for authors running several publications they can aggregate more than one list. They order the directory; they do not rank the writing.

Disclosure
This directory is compiled and edited by Christian Péan, MD, MS — orthopaedic trauma surgeon, CEO and co-founder of RevelAi Health, and faculty at Duke University School of Medicine and the Duke-Margolis Institute for Health Policy. He is also listed on it. RevelAi Health operates in musculoskeletal digital health, a space some listed writers also work in or write about. No one pays to be included, no listing is sponsored, and no placement is sold.