The waiting room outside the hepatology clinic at Kochi’s Rajagiri Hospital hangs between hope and despair.
A man silently stares at the floor, weakened by advanced liver disease and in urgent need of treatment. Nearby, another family is holding a folder of old medical reports, hoping the hospital can still save their loved one. Inside, Dr Cyriac Abby Phillips is in no hurry.
A patient sits in front of him. Phillips leans forward, asks a question, then becomes silent. He listens – in fact, he really does listen. When he speaks again, his assessment is clear but expressed with compassion. He doesn’t simply tell the family what will happen next; he carefully leads them to the road ahead.
I spent two days at his clinic in the south Indian state of Kerala, expecting to find an entirely different man.
Phillips is one of India’s best-known – and most polarising – doctors, praised by supporters as a fearless champion of evidence-based medicine and reviled by critics as an attention-seeking provocateur.
Supporters praise him as a fearless champion of evidence-based medicine, while critics revile him as an attention-seeking provocateur.
On X, where more than 300,000 people follow him as the “Liver Doctor”, he has called homoeopathy “false medicine”, branded alternative practitioners quacks and told critics that their brains are “for hire”. Alternative practitioners accused him of not understanding the Indian system and attacked them unfairly.
His feed is full of public health information, but also full of bitter feuds – including with celebrities – conducted in a style that many describe as rude.
India’s AYUSH ministry – the federal body overseeing traditional medicine – has held two formal committee meetings to discuss these issues. Once a police inspector travelled by train for two days from the northern state of Uttar Pradesh to enquire over a social media post. Phillips has faced 16 legal cases in six years, some of which are still ongoing.
Yet the man behind the social media persona seemed entirely different in person.
During our conversation he appeared measured and soft-spoken. Patients, colleagues and doctors who knew him for a long time also described him in similar terms: polite, unassuming and humble.
“It’s an adopted personality,” he says without apology. “They hate me. But they can’t invalidate the information I give.”
“Sometimes you have to be loud to be heard. I specifically go after trolls so they don’t distract from the message I’m trying to convey. If people think I’m rude or angry, even if that’s not true, I’m willing to pay that price.”
