ScrubChat Community Guidelines

Version: guidelines-2026-08-01

Medicine is hard enough. This place should not be.

These rules exist for two reasons: to protect patients who never agreed to be

discussed online, and to keep this a place exhausted people can actually stand to

be. Everything below serves one of those two ends. If a rule ever stops serving

either, it should go.

The one rule with no exceptions

Never post identifiable patient information.

Not a name. Not initials plus a hospital. Not a UHID, IP number, OP number, lab

number or accession number. Not an exact date of birth, admission, surgery or

death. Not a phone number, address or Aadhaar. Not a face. Not a whiteboard in

the background of your photo. Not a wristband in the corner of an X-ray.

How to share a case properly:

There is no seniority exemption, no "it's a rare case so nobody will know"

exemption, and no "I have consent" exemption from the technical block. Consent is

necessary; it is not sufficient. De-identify anyway.

Why we are absolute about this: the patient is not in the room. They cannot

object, cannot appeal, and did not sign up here. Everyone else in this

conversation can speak for themselves. They cannot.

What is welcome here

Being wrong out loud. Confidently wrong is how everyone learns medicine. Say

the differential you are not sure about. Ask the question you think is stupid.

Nobody here gets penalised for not knowing something.

Dark humour. Gallows humour is a coping mechanism, not a character flaw. Joke

about the job, the hours, the consultants, the coffee, and yourself as much as

you like. The line is aiming it at patients as people, or at a protected group.

Saying you are struggling. Burnout, exhaustion, hating your rotation,

questioning whether you should have done this at all — all of it is fine to say

here, plainly, without dressing it up. **Posts about your own distress are never

removed, never limited, and never counted against you.** If our system spots one,

it attaches support information and gets out of the way.

Disagreement. Argue about the management plan. Cite the paper. Change your

mind in public. That is the whole point.

Clinical detail. Anatomy, genitalia, sexual health, autopsy findings, gore,

drug pharmacology — this is a professional platform and these are professional

subjects. Our filters know the difference between a chancre and a come-on.

What is not

Aimed at a person

• Harassment, pile-ons, threats, stalking
• Telling someone to kill themselves — this is removed immediately, always
• Sexual solicitation or unsolicited explicit content
• Sharing someone's personal information without consent
• Impersonating a real person or claiming credentials you do not hold

Aimed at a group

Slurs and dehumanising language targeting race, caste, religion, gender,

sexuality, disability or national origin. There is no reclaimed-use exemption

applied automatically — if you believe your use was legitimate, appeal it and a

human will look.

Dangerous to patients

• Telling someone to stop insulin, antiretrovirals, TB treatment or antiepileptics
• Promoting bleach, MMS, or "natural cures" for cancer
• Anti-vaccine claims presented as fact
• Giving a specific drug and dose for a real, unexamined person

Important: we label and down-rank dangerous misinformation. We do not

usually delete it. Deleting turns a correctable error into a martyrdom story and

prevents the correction from ever being seen. Debunking, teaching about

misinformation, and exam questions about it are all completely fine and are

explicitly detected as such.

Illegal

• Selling or seeking controlled drugs, or trading blank prescriptions
• Leaked exam papers, proxy attendance, exam impersonation
• Forged degrees, certificates or registration numbers
• Organ trade
• Prenatal sex determination (illegal under the PCPNDT Act 1994)
• Practising or prescribing without registration

Commercial rubbish

• Seat-selling, management-quota brokering, "admission guaranteed"
• Pirated Marrow/PrepLadder/AMBOSS/UWorld material or shared logins
• Crypto, investment schemes, guaranteed-returns anything
• Follow-for-follow and engagement farming

Case discussions

Case threads are the strictest surface here.

• Verified clinicians only — interns, residents, doctors, faculty
• Age bands, never exact ages — the form will not accept one
• A de-identification attestation you sign, which is recorded permanently
• Images blurred by default, so nobody meets a degloving injury by surprise
• The tightest moderation thresholds on the platform

If you are a student, you can read every case thread. You just cannot start one.

What happens when you break a rule

The ladder is deliberately gentle at the bottom and firm at the top.

Three commitments:

• Strikes expire. A mistake in March should not still cost you in December.
• The bot cannot ban you. It can suspend. Only a human can close an account

permanently, and that is enforced in our code, not just our policy.

• A person reads every appeal. The automated system never reviews its own

work. If an appeal succeeds we remove the strike and refund the trust penalty

— not just stop counting it.

If you need to report something

Tap ⋯ on any post. It takes one click, there is no captcha, and duplicates are

handled silently. Patient-data reports go straight to the front of the queue and

hide the content immediately while a human looks.

Making it hard to report abuse in order to reduce report volume is a trade that

always costs the victim more than it costs the abuser. So we have not made that

trade.

If you are struggling

Medical training has a genuine, measurable mental-health cost, and a lot of

people here have been where you are.

• India: Tele-MANAS 14416 · AASRA +91-9820466726 · Vandrevala +91-9999666555
• US: 988
• UK: Samaritans 116 123
• Anywhere: findahelpline.com

You will not get in trouble for posting about this. That is a promise the code

keeps, not just the policy.

*Questions about these guidelines: support@scrubchat.app. Formal complaints:

grievance@scrubchat.app.*