05/25/2026
For ten years you could Google “Dr. Stephanie Waggel” and Dr. Stephanie Waggel would come up. Now pages and pages of scammy mental health apps come up first.
She Googled her own name to see what her patients would see. She was number 452 in the results.
The clinic at the top of the page? She has never worked there.
Stephanie Waggel, MD is a psychiatrist with a private practice in Ashburn and Reston, Virginia. For ten years, running her own clinic was hard but workable. Then this year, something changed. She typed her own name into a search bar to see what would come up when patients looked her up before a visit. The first result was a corporate clinic that owns her name in search but has never employed her. The second result was the same kind of clinic. So was the third. So were the fourth, the fifth, the sixth, the seventh.
She scrolled to result 452 before she found her own practice.
This is what vertical integration looks like at the search bar. The same parent companies that own the insurance, the pharmacy benefit manager, the bulk-purchase group, the drug distributor, the mail-order pharmacy, the retail pharmacy, and the clinic chain now also own the search result that connects you to all of it. The doctor at the top of your Google results is not the doctor with the best care. The doctor at the top is the clinic with the largest parent corporation.
The actual doctor, the one with the actual practice and the actual patients, is on page 45.
She is fighting it by showing up in person. Chamber of Commerce meetings. School visits. Local sheriff's office events. Community panels. The corporate clinics that own her search results cannot show up to those rooms; they cannot tell anyone the names of the people who supposedly work there. Independent physicians can. So that is where the work is now.
This is happening right now, in Northern Virginia, to a psychiatrist who built her practice from scratch and is watching the internet pretend her clinic does not exist.
Listen to the full conversation on The Podcast by KevinMD. Link in the comments.
What is one independent practice in your community that your friends and family should be finding first instead of the corporate version?
