<![CDATA[Despite TikTok’s growing role as a primary health information source in the Philippines, little scholarly attention has examined how Filipino health professionals construct credibility and communicate with mass digital audiences. This study analyzed the communication strategies, credibility construction, and audience reception of Arshie Larga (@arshielarga), the Philippines' most prominent pharmacist-content creator on TikTok. Using qualitative content analysis grounded in Source Credibility Theory, 33 videos and 212 audience comments were examined for expertise cues, trustworthiness signals, communication strategies, health topics, and audience response patterns. Findings reveal that Larga constructs credibility through two complementary mechanisms: professional expertise markers and interpersonal trustworthiness behaviors. Communication strategies ranged from educational explainers and myth-busting to storytelling and question-and-answer formats. Health topics spanned medication safety, gastrointestinal health, respiratory illness, women's health, and emerging pharmacological treatments. Audience responses clustered into five themes, trust, confusion, gratitude, questions, and behavior change, indicating active rather than passive engagement with pharmacist-generated content. The prevalence of gratitude and behavior change responses exposes a structural gap in point-of-care patient education within the Philippine health system. These findings affirm that short-form pharmacist-generated video on TikTok can function as a meaningful public health education tool, bridging scientific authority with communicative accessibility for broad Filipino audiences.]]>
