Is the medical certificate or record genuine?
Medical certificates, patient-record printouts and attestations are used as evidence in insurance claims, sick leave and disputes. They are easy to edit in a PDF editor. But editing leaves traces.
Updated 2026-08-31 · Veriflied
Why these documents in particular
A medical certificate or a record printout carries weight. It can decide a travel-insurance claim, an accident claim, sick leave or compensation. At the same time it is easy to obtain as a genuine document and then alter: a date, a diagnosis, a name, a period. It takes nothing more than a PDF editor.
What matters is that these documents are issued by a system in a single pass. Health portals, GP systems and hospital record systems produce the PDF complete, and nobody edits it afterwards. Any edit is therefore a finding in itself.
Signs you can check
Issuer and format
Portal printouts and medical certificates have fixed layouts, headers and footers. Compare with a document from the same source that you know is genuine.
Dates and periods
Does the consultation date match the certificate date? Does the sick period fit the rest of the case? A certificate written 'yesterday' about a consultation three months ago is unusual.
Doctor and provider number
Does the doctor exist? Are provider number and address correct? These can be looked up. Call the clinic if the case is large enough.
Fonts and alignment
Edited text often has a slightly different font, size or position than the rest. Look at line spacing around the field that 'matters'.
What the file reveals
When a PDF is edited in Acrobat or similar, the program writes it into the file's own history. It literally says the document was edited, when and with which tool. Acrobat's text editing also leaves a separate marker that never appears from merely opening or printing the document.
If the file is saved again after editing, the original version often still sits inside the file. It can be extracted and placed next to the submitted one, so you can see exactly what changed. The producer chain also shows whether the tool that saved the file differs from the one that created it.
For a document from a health portal or a GP system, one such finding is enough to require an explanation. Two or more together mean the submitted document is not the one the issuer produced.
An example
A patient-record printout is submitted in a travel-insurance claim. The text looks right. The file's history shows 'editedScannedDoc' with Adobe Acrobat 25 minutes after the printout was made, and the file was saved twice. The earlier version can be extracted from the file. The comparison shows the treatment date was moved a week so it falls within the trip. A forensic analysis finds this in under a minute, and the report shows both versions.
Frequently asked questions
Can a genuine medical certificate have editing traces?
Very rarely. If a clinic corrects an error, it issues a new document. A system-issued document with an edit history is a reason to request the original from the issuer.
What if the document is a photo or a scan?
Then the analysis looks at the image instead: camera chain, compression and whether regions of the image were generated or inserted. An AI detector and a heatmap show where manipulation occurred.
Can you see what was changed?
Often, yes. When an earlier version sits inside the file, it can be extracted and compared word by word with the submitted version.
May I open and save the document myself?
Open it, but do not save. Saving adds a revision of your own and disturbs the traces. Keep the original file as it arrived.
Try it on your own document
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