Most people meet Randall Ortel as the TikTok doctor. A warm face in scrubs, explaining something medical in a way that finally makes sense. What they don’t see is the road he took to get there.
Randall drove a taxi through his university years to cover what his bursaries and his family couldn’t. The people in his community knew him as the driver. They had no idea he was a struggling medical student trying to fund his way through the University of Cape Town. He kept going, and became the first doctor of colour to come out of Manenberg.
That is the story underneath the content. It matters, because it explains why people trust him.
The moment he decided to speak
When Covid arrived in 2020, misinformation moved faster than any health department could. Voice notes, forwarded messages, WhatsApp certainty from people with no training at all. Randall watched it reach his own community and decided he was not going to sit quietly with a medical degree while it happened.
So he opened TikTok.
He had the expertise and he had the instincts. What he didn’t have yet was the platform craft: how to open a video so someone stops, how to compress a complex answer into something that survives a scroll, how to sound like a person rather than a pamphlet. Being right is not the same as being heard.
Where I came in
I was introduced to Randall through Ultimate Media in Johannesburg, and came on board as his TikTok coach.
The work was not about turning a doctor into an entertainer. It was the opposite. It was about protecting what made him credible while removing everything that got in its way. We worked on hooks that earn the first two seconds. On structure, so a single idea lands cleanly instead of three ideas landing halfway. On pacing, delivery, and the discipline of answering the question people are actually asking rather than the one you wish they’d asked.
Medical authority is the hardest kind of authority to translate, because the instinct that makes someone a good clinician (be thorough, qualify everything, cover the exceptions) is exactly the instinct that kills a short-form video. My job was to help him hold onto the accuracy and let go of the armour.
What the platform opened
Then the platform did what a good platform is supposed to do. It opened doors.
On the strength of his reach, Randall went on to partner with government and join the Western Cape Premier’s team. Same voice, same values, far bigger room. That is the part people miss about TikTok. They see a follower count. What it actually buys you is a seat at tables that were previously closed.
He has since graduated cum laude with a Master’s in Obstetrics, and he started a foundation to mentor the doctors coming up behind him. Sunday World covered him as a man of many firsts, and they were not exaggerating.
Why I keep telling this one
Randall still credits his TikTok coach publicly. For me, that is the whole point.
The work was always his. The years in the taxi, the degree, the decision to speak up when it would have been easier not to, the Master’s, the foundation. None of that is mine and I would never claim it. What I did was help him be seen by the people who needed to hear him.
That is what coaching is. It is not a formula bolted onto someone. It is finding what is already true about a person and making it legible to a platform that rewards clarity. When the person underneath is real, the platform becomes an amplifier rather than a costume.
If you have something worth saying
If you are an expert in your field and you know your voice belongs in front of more people, that gap between knowing your subject and knowing the platform is a solvable problem. It is the gap I work in.
Work with me or find me on TikTok @morne.ebersohn.
