- Recently, two TikTok videos by medical professionals
have gone viral, and not for good reasons.
Are these truly mocking patients,
or are they just innocent jokes?
Let's see for ourselves.
(lo-fi hip-hop music)
Being on social media as a public figure
is hard enough on its own,
but being a medical professional on social media
is even harder.
Look, I'm a board certified family medicine physician,
I've been doing social media for five plus years,
over 9 million subscribers,
over 400 million views on this YouTube channel,
and I'm still figuring it out.
So I'm not surprised that medical professionals
who are just getting into social media
are already making some mistakes
and taking some heat for it.
What I thought we'd do today
is watch the two videos that have garnered
a lot of negative buzz,
discuss my thoughts on those videos
and what should happen moving forward,
and then leave you off with some tips that I believe
would help anyone, but especially medical professionals,
navigate this tricky social media landscape.
Let's check the first one out
that made national headlines.
(gasping rhythmically)
(whooping to the beat)
- [Female Doctor] Get it!
Get it!
Get it! (gasping stops)
(female doctor continues rapping)
- The tweet that this came from actually says,
"We know when y'all faking," with a few laughing emojis.
This is frustrating.
I'm all about being able to laugh at ourselves,
about finding humor in dark places.
I've said time and time again,
I try and lighten my patients' mood
by making jokes quite often,
even patients who are the most sick,
and, to be honest, they usually appreciate it.
However, this is a strong however,
when I walk into a patient's room,
I don't just blindly make a joke.
I first develop a rapport with the patient,
understand where they're coming from,
pick up their verbal and non-verbal cues.
Then I say the joke, and then I pick up
those cues again to see how the joke landed.
It doesn't always land.
But at that point, I can readjust or explain.
When you post a video like this to social media
where millions of people can see it,
now you've lost the ability
to pick up on context,
the ability to explain yourself to everyone watching it
what you really meant.
There's such a fine line of humor in medicine
that you really just need to be careful,
especially in this day and age
where there's a growing distrust of medical professionals
by the general public.
In fact, there was a huge segment on this
with John Oliver covering medical bias
and it really explored how women,
and specifically women of color,
are actually disbelieved disproportionately
when it comes to their symptoms.
And then a video like this comes out?
It stokes that fire right away.
There's just a way to do tasteful comedy
and this was just a miss for me.
Let's take a look at the second video,
which I found through Twitter,
but it was initially posted to TikTok
by the username Mursimedical.
I usually like to blur the account names
and peoples' faces, but this video has been viewed
millions of times and I think the facial expressions
actually contribute to the feel of the video,
so let's just take a look at it together.
(quiet, mischievous music)
I can definitely see how from one perspective,
if you're watching this as someone who's maybe
had symptoms that have been written off
by medical professionals, how that can trigger you.
Easily!
If I went to an ER and was saying,
"I think I have symptoms of a heart attack
"because I looked it up online,"
and a doctor rolls their eyes and says,
"Is it cocaine?"
I would be pretty upset by that.
Yes, patients get their illnesses wrong,
they're not doctors.
Yes, they're gonna recite to you
something they read online that's gonna be inaccurate,
but they're not doctors.
Now, if this person was a comedian doing this,
I don't think anyone would actually be mad,
but when you're the person who's supposed to be
taking care of people when they're in their most
insecure moments, when they're the most frightened,
and you're poking fun of that situation,
(sighs)
there's a line there that gets crossed.
This video actually came on my radar
from a post by Sarah Mojarad
that reads as such,
"Ugh, posts like this jeopardize the public's trust
"in medical professionals.
"Why?
"Symptoms aren't taken seriously,
"She's profiled the person based on age,
"patient may have Googled symptoms to avoid trip to the ER.
"Don't make fun of patients.
"It is and always will be unprofessional."
I actually spoke with Sarah Mojarad
right before making this video
to discuss this feed that really blew up,
I think this video has
something like 7 million views now,
and there is over a thousand comments,
nearly a hundred thousand retweets,
and we discussed what has come of
the conversation so far.
What many doctors initially said when seeing this video
was that no doctor should be on TikTok
and probably not on social media altogether,
but what Sarah told me was that,
upon hearing all of this critique
of doctors being on TikTok,
she started coming across examples
of doctors doing a great job educating on TikTok
and other social media platforms.
In fact, a lot of the people she told me
are names I've either met in person,
come across on YouTube or other platforms
that truly do evidence-based, educational,
and even fun content.
I'm actually gonna drop all their handles
in the description box
so you too can check them out.
I'm not the only doctor on social media making videos.
And in general, I want more doctors on social media.
Not all of them, we don't all need to be there,
but certainly there's a lack of quality,
evidence-based physicians on there
because misinformation is thriving.
In fact, social media has become
a misinformation super highway
where someone makes a thread titled,
"Carrots cure cancer,"
it goes viral because of the algorithms,
and now there's no counter information to it.
But if we have enough doctors that have a good reach,
engaged viewership, they can now put out counter information
to educate patients.
Is this carrot article true?
Is it true that you can detoxify your body?
We can make a difference.
There's over 3 billion people logged in online
across the world.
We have to, as doctors, go to where our patients are,
and right now, they're on their phones, iPads,
laptops, computers, and they're on social media.
So we need to log on,
figure out how to reach them,
figure out how to get these algorithms
to share our content, and do the best thing we know how,
educate and practice preventive care.
Since I want more medical professionals online,
I thought that within this video, I can give five tips
that anyone who's in the medical field
that wants to start a medical account
should take into serious consideration.
I, in fact, made this list
when I was doing my presentation for the Mayo Clinic
on social media, so I hope you enjoy.
All right, let's kick it off.
Rule number one, if you post it,
assume everyone will see it.
This means your co-workers, hospital staff,
patients, family members of patients,
all of the above,
and not only will they see it,
it will never be permanently deleted.
I just came across a website that actively stores
all Instagram stories that, like, profile accounts
with more than 5000 followers
forever!
Just think about that for a second.
You could post something, change your mind
five seconds later thinking no one saw it,
but it forever lives in that database.
There was a recent case of a first-year doctor
who also got in trouble on Twitter
by making a post on, I believe Instagram,
where he sort of put a picture of him looking quite sultry
with the caption saying, "Ready for your well woman exam."
And for those of you who don't know,
a well woman exam is a breast and gynecological exam.
Again, I want to be charitable thinking
and thinking that this is not
done with ill intent,
but, it's just, like, it's poor taste.
Two, we need to stop the fear mongering
of professionals being on social media.
Yes, it's hard, yes, it's not the same as
having a personal account, but it is doable.
We can learn how to do it,
we can learn how to get better at it,
and it takes some communication.
Communication is something that doctors
are traditionally very poor at.
In fact, Sarah Mojarad, who I mentioned earlier,
teaches science communication and social media education
for the USC medical curriculum,
and I applaud her for it.
She told me about the way that she discusses
certain case studies, how doctors should function on Yelp,
there's a lot to be learned here,
and unless we discuss it openly like we're doing now
and not just scare people and say,
"Social media is all bad," we're never gonna get better.
Social media is not going anywhere.
People love it, they spend hours a day on it,
so we need to figure out how to get better at it
instead of just saying, "Eh, not for us."
I get countless emails weekly
of patients saying because of my videos
they've been vaccinated,
their children have been vaccinated,
they've changed their stance on cancer screenings,
they stopped following crash diets,
and that's what this whole journey is about.
We need to not down-talk social media,
we need to figure out what the good parts are,
the bad parts are, and then make the best educated decision.
Three, never give individualized advice
through social media, perform any kind of patient care,
or break patient privacy, I mean HIPAA.
I've seen doctors actually cross this line
about giving patients direct advice,
and I don't think that's ever ideal.
Without doing a proper history, physical,
and even running some tests,
you're gonna be doing a disservice
by giving individual advice through the web.
Four, if you're doing any kind of sponsorship,
declare it right away and make sure you're not
selling out to pseudo-science.
One of my biggest motivating factors in
going on social media and making these YouTube videos
was to debunk pseudo-science.
To tell patients that detox teas are a scam,
video link below.
To talk about why taking the majority of supplements
isn't necessary, video link down below.
To talk about why vaccinations are necessary
and don't cause autism, video link down below.
And when it comes to sponsorships, I do them.
There's nothing wrong about being successful financially
on social media as a doctor.
Just, if you're gonna do them,
make sure that you let people know right away
that it's a sponsored piece of content,
explain why you're doing it,
and please, before you get into any kind of arrangement,
check with your conscience and your moral compass first
to make sure that you're not deceiving any of your patients
or loyal viewers.
And finally, number five,
be humble and ready to accept critique.
None of us are perfect,
and just because we had a medical education
does not make us better than anybody.
We make mistakes, I have well over 200 videos
on my channel, and there's some mistakes in them.
I always make sure to, after the fact,
either plug it into the video with a correction,
or at least in the description box that I made a mistake,
but we have to be open and admit those mistakes.
In fact, medical information changes.
It changes quite rapidly, we learn new things,
so you have to make updates on information
that is now outdated.
"Please do not confuse your Google search
"with my medical degree."
While this is funny, it's not exactly accurate
because your medical degree was earned years ago.
Google has a lot of up-to-date information on it
so you can be wrong.
When you approach medical education
with that level of humility,
not only to your patients and viewers
get better information,
but also you get better
because you open up yourself to critique and debate
so it forces you to learn more,
be more up-to-date, and essentially,
be a better medical professional.
I put together a playlist for you
of my medical journey,
you can check it out right here,
or if you want some really interesting medical videos,
there's a playlist right here.
I'll watch either one of these
with you being happy and healthy.
(lo-fi hip-hop music)