🎓 Education — a source of pride or a state secret? I run a ...

🎓 Education — a source of pride or a state secret?

I run a fairly large network of public pages. One of the most popular ones is dedicated to beauty industry fails: botched nails 💅, bad tattoos 🖋, shady cosmetology procedures, and other gems. Together with my editor, we decided to run an experiment — we contacted specialists on Avito and asked: do you have a medical degree? And if so, would you be willing to show your diploma? 📄

We reached out to cosmetologists, piercers, nutritionists 🥦, sexologists 🛏, and sleep specialists 😴. The results exceeded all expectations.

If a cosmetologist is doing injections 💉, they are required to have medical training. But… most simply ignored the request for proof. One woman claimed that her diploma is “personal data” and would only show it in person — because “there are too many scammers.” And honestly, she’s not wrong: there are a lot of scammers offering expensive procedures without even basic qualifications, putting patients’ health at serious risk ⚠️. That’s exactly why, in Russia, a federal diploma verification registry was introduced back in 2014. So what kind of “personal data” are we talking about, really?

The sleep specialists were my favorite. In theory, they treat conditions like insomnia, sleep apnea, and sleepwalking (among others — the full list is quite impressive). But on Avito, it’s a breeding ground for esotericism and nonsense: dream interpretation 🌀, “energy work”, metaphorical cards, and the like. Some even claimed that “there are no diplomas for sleep medicine” 🤷‍♀️. Technically true — that wording doesn’t appear on diplomas. But to be a proper sleep specialist in Russia, you need a medical degree in general or pediatric medicine, followed by residency in psychiatry, neurology, or pulmonology — plus a certification course in sleep medicine. One “expert” even sent us a diploma in IT 🧑‍💻. Honestly, felt like the next thing would be tarot cards 🃏.

🎩 Speaking of cards — any magician knows a dozen ways to deal whatever card order they want. One client gets a “happy” reading, another gets “coffin, devil, tower”… and then — switch! Do that a few times and voilà: magic 🤡.

And if we’re talking deception that’s not for entertainment — the most common criminal cases under Article 327 of the Russian Criminal Code involve forged education documents. Though some scammers don’t even bother forging anything — they just buy novelty diplomas and certificates from marketplaces like Ozon or Wildberries.

Real professionals don’t hide their diplomas. They publish them on their websites, social media pages, and medical directories like “ProDoctors” — because they have nothing to hide.

Of course, there are fields where a diploma isn’t essential. For example, IT 🌐 — things move so fast that universities can’t keep up. But even here, a diploma can matter in some situations.