No medical claims, no diagnoses, ever

You are paid to give an opinion about a submission, not a finding about a person. Those sound like the same thing from the buyer's side and they are not the same thing at all, and the difference is the entire reason this work is safe to sell.

Cross the line once, in writing, under your own working name, and you have converted a fifteen-pound job into something a regulator, a platform and occasionally a lawyer would all have views about.

The line, stated plainly

On your side of it: what you were sent, what you observed, how it compares to whatever you said you would compare it to, and what you thought of it. All of that is opinion about an image or a recording, offered by a person the buyer chose to ask.

On the other side of it: anything that describes a condition, predicts an outcome, evaluates health, or tells someone their body needs to be different. That is not a stronger version of your opinion. It is a different category of statement, one that only qualified people are permitted to make, and being confident does not move you into that category.

The test that works under pressure is whether the sentence is about the file or about the human being. "The lighting flattens the outline and the framing is inconsistent between the two shots" is about the file. "This looks like it might be a symptom of something" is about the human being, and you cannot write it.

The specific claims to never make

Five patterns cover almost all of it.

Anything naming or hinting at a condition. Including the hedged forms. "I am not a doctor, but that could be" is the exact sentence that gets people into trouble, because the disclaimer does not undo the claim, it just proves you knew you were making one.

Anything predicting a consequence. Fertility, function, future change, risk.

Anything comparing to a clinical norm. "Normal" is a word with a medical meaning attached to it, and a buyer will hear the medical meaning whatever you meant.

Anything recommending an intervention. Products, exercises, procedures, supplements. This includes the well-meant version where you name something you personally rate. If you would not say it as a stranger on a bus, do not put it in a paid deliverable.

Anything implying a body should or could be different. The trade sells assessment, not a target.

Why the line exists where it is

Three separate things sit behind it. Unqualified medical claims are regulated in essentially every country, and the fact that yours was informal and cost twenty pounds does not exempt it. In the UK, rule 12.2 of the CAP advertising code says marketers "must not discourage essential treatment", and bars specific advice or diagnosis without a suitably qualified health professional; in the US, the FTC's Health Products Compliance Guidance requires health claims to rest on "competent and reliable scientific evidence". Platforms carry the liability for what their sellers publish, so a claim like this is the fastest available route to a suspension that no appeal recovers. And the buyer may act on it, which is the part that actually matters: someone anxious enough to pay a stranger for an opinion is exactly the person who will take an offhand line seriously for a year.

The insurance question is downstream of the same thing, and it is worth reading the note on when liability cover starts to matter before your work drifts anywhere near sounding like advice.

How to redirect the ask

Buyers do ask. Usually not as a demand, but as a hopeful aside at the end of a brief, and often as the real reason they booked.

The reply that works is short, warm and does not negotiate.

That is not something I can give an opinion on, and honestly not something anyone should from a photo. What I can do is [the thing you actually sell]. If health is the question, a GP is the right call and it is a five-minute conversation.

Three moves in there and each is doing a job. You decline without apology, so there is nothing to push against. You restate what you do sell, so the booking survives the refusal. And you point at the right destination, which is the part that makes the whole thing read as competence rather than as a rule you are hiding behind.

Do not offer a partial version. The compromise answer, where you say a little but hedge heavily, is worse than either the refusal or the claim, because it gives the buyer something to act on and gives you nothing to stand on afterwards.

What this means for how you write, all the time

Write about the submission in the language of the submission, every job, so that the boundary is not a thing you have to remember at the end.

Defined axes help more than intention does here. If your rubric names the things you assess, the deliverable has a shape and the shape does not have a slot for a medical opinion. That is a second-order benefit of having a reusable rubric, and it is the one nobody mentions when they recommend building one.

The related failure is the confident guess about something you simply could not see, which is a competence problem rather than a legal one, and the answer to that is different.

Precision about measurement, where a buyer genuinely wants a number rather than a judgement, is a documented subject with conventions of its own, and Measure My Cock's method notes are where that belongs rather than in your deliverable. Automated scoring runs into the same wall from the other direction: a model produces a number and cannot produce a diagnosis either, and the accuracy write-up there is unusually clear about what a score does and does not establish. What a number means to the person receiving it is its own subject, and it is not yours.

If a buyer's actual question is what a score out of ten means about them, that has a direct answer on Rate Cock, and sending them there is a better job than improvising one.