Beyond the Hepatology Halls: India's Most Polarising Liver Doctor
The waiting room outside Rajagiri Hospital in Kochi is a silent witness to hope and despair.
One patient, frail with advanced liver disease, stares at the floor while another family clutches an old folder of medical reports, praying the hospital can still save their loved one.
In the clinic, Dr Cyriac Abby Philips works calmly at his desk. He sits opposite a patient, listens intently, then delivers a candid, compassionate explanation of what lies ahead. By the time he speaks again, the conversation feels intentional and meaningful.
To the untrained eye, a chaos of social media posts roils. On X, where over 300,000 followers call him the ‘Liver Doc’, he denounces homeopathy as “false medicine”, labels alternative practitioners as quacks, and calls critics’ brains “for rent”. He speaks harshly to celebrities and detractors alike, a style that critics describe as rude.
Over six years, Dr Philips has been entangled in 16 legal cases, some still pending. The Ayush Ministry has convened two committees solely to discuss him, and a police officer travelled two days by train from Uttar Pradesh to interrogate him over a single post.
Despite the online chaos, the man he met in his clinic was polite, unassuming and courteous. When asked about the persona he portrays online, Philips said it is an “adopted persona” that does not negate the accuracy of the information he shares.
His career began neither from a passion for writing nor a love of cinema; it was a path charted by his father, a celebrated gastroenterologist from Kerala. The first attempt to pass the medical entrance exam failed, but a second try earned him a place at St. John’s Medical College in Bangalore. He subsequently settled in Kolkata’s 3,500‑bed public hospital, where shortages of insulin and limited resources forged into his appreciation of vulnerability.
He trained at the Institute of Liver and Biliary Sciences in Delhi, then returned to Kerala to rebuild his father’s practice after it was acquired by a business group.
Driving his obsession with alternative medicines, Dr Philips began publishing case studies on social platforms. The backlash from traditional medicine practitioners was fierce, but he persisted, arguing that their claims are not based on scientific logic. His research has identified liver injury related to indigenous medicines, and he has spearheaded crowdsourced investigations into the safety of protein powders and generic drugs sold across India.
On the clinical front, the majority of his patients suffer from alcohol‑related liver disease, an escalating crisis in India. He has signed more death certificates than he can count and strives to make final days dignified for the dying. After a near‑fatal car crash, he reduced his patient load to 25 per day and gave up alcohol to better advise those he treats.
Beyond hospital walls, Dr Philips is known as an avid gamer and a devoted husband. He shares the truth that not everyone sees that image on social media; his day‑to‑day life is focused, intentional and balanced with family time.
Legal challenges have not deterred him. While thousands of rupees have been spent on defense, his response to the Ayush Ministry’s call on one study was a detailed rebuttal that he moved on from without retreating. He knows that public warning calls and threats against his family have forced him to fortify personal safety, yet he refuses to abandon his mission.
For Dr Philips, the stakes extend beyond individual reputation: it’s a broader fight for public health and for uncovering the truth about treatments widely used without scrutiny.
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