The Medical Writing Skills That Will Make You Irreplaceable in the Age of AI
The five essential medical writing skills that AI can’t replicate — and how to develop them deliberately, from a freelance medical writer with over a decade of experience.
This is Post 2 in Make Sense Health: For Writers — a five-part series on building a career in health and medical writing. In Post 1, I covered the full landscape of the health writing market and what it actually pays. If you’re new to the series, start there. Upgrade for full access.
Explore other posts in the series:
Post 2: The Medical Writing Skills That Will Make You Irreplaceable in the Age of AI (this one)
Post 3: How to Do Your Best Work Within Real-World Constraints
Post 4: The Medical Writer’s Manifesto: Why The Reader Should Come First
Post 5: How I Find And Keep High-Paying Clients Without Cold Pitching
Let’s start with what AI can do.
It can find and summarise research. It can draft content to a brief. It can adjust tone for different audiences, reformat the same information for different platforms, and produce consistent, technically competent prose at speed.
It is genuinely useful. Anyone who tells you it isn’t hasn’t used it properly.
But sometimes AI gets it wrong.
AI has no understanding of context. It doesn’t know when a study’s limitations matter more than its conclusions.
It can’t assess whether a source is credible or industry-funded with an agenda.
It hallucinates references that don’t exist, invents statistics, and presents them with the same confidence as real data.
It flattens nuance in ways that make health information misleading even when it’s technically accurate.
And it has no concept of the reader as a real person — someone who might be frightened, confused, making a decision that affects their treatment, their family, their life.
That is why skilled, principled health and medical writers are more valuable now than they’ve ever been — if they can demonstrate the skills that AI cannot replicate.
Read on, and I’ll share what those key skills are and where you can offer most value.
Why listen to me?
I’ve been a medical and health writer since 2012. Four of those years as a freelancer, and a decade before that working for some of the UK’s leading healthcare communications agencies, including as Team Leader at Havas SO.
I don’t have a science degree — I have a Philosophy and English BA. You might be wondering whether that disqualifies you from doing this work at the highest level. It doesn’t. And I’m not the only one who’ll tell you that.
Here’s what clients say about my work:
“Rachel is a tremendously talented and dedicated writer who can take complex scientific information and turn it into something simple, clear and purposeful. No matter how complicated the task, Rachel works with you to understand the brief, gently challenges where needed and delivers the work on time.” — Head of Digital Solutions, Leading Healthcare Communications Agency
“I have always found Rachel to be reliable, professional and very thorough. She has great knowledge of the industry and subject area, so I really trust her judgement and know she will complete all projects to a high standard.” — Managing Director, Med Comms Agency
A Philosophy degree and ten plus years of deliberate skill-building. No science degree required.
Here’s what a physician who regularly commissions medical writers — including me — has said about this:
The skills that make a great medical writer are distinct from clinical training. The best healthcare professionals are not always the strongest writers. Sometimes they are, but they don’t all have the necessary skills you have.
What I have — and what I’ve seen distinguish the writers who build strong, sustainable careers from the ones who struggle — is a specific set of skills. Not generic writing skills, and not medical qualifications (although these are certainly useful too).
Something in between.
Here are the five that I think matter most.
