Rock band of docs urges people to stay home.
Rock band of physicians is spouting a familiar refrain — and it’s catching on
The melody is meant to be catchy.
In fact, if the words to “Stay at Home” get stuck in your head, then Dr. Phuong Nguyen, who wrote and performed lead vocal and guitar, would say the song is a success.
The refrain states, “Stay at home. Help the doctor.”
And that’s a message worth repeating, Nguyen said.
“It was by design that we sing that chorus so many times,” said Nguyen, who is director of craniofacial surgery in the division of pediatric plastic surgery at Children’s Memorial Hermann, as well as assistant professor of surgery at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, McGovern Medical School. “Your individual behavior can make a real difference.”
Nguyen also made a video for the tune, starring physicians from across country, including several from Houston, who sing along with the chorus, in scrubs and masks. The video closes with the weblink findthemasks .com, a site that directs how and where to donate masks and other protective equipment to medical professionals.
It’s the latest project from Help the Doctor, a band composed of surgeons who rock. The group formed in Los Angeles, when members connected during training at the UCLA medical campus. P. Danger, lead singer and stage name for Dr. Nguyen, joined with Robby “Rip Towns” Kang on guitar, keys and backup vocals. Kang serves as neck-facial plastic reconstructive surgeon at City of Hope Cancer Center. On bass is Jason Roostaeian, or “J. Roost,” plastic surgeon at UCLA Medical Center, and on drums is Solomon Poyourow, or “Sol Power,” who by day works as oral maxillofacial surgeon at Alamitos Oral Surgery.
With all the band members now living in different locales, they typically fly to play gigs together. But for this recent project, they connected through technology. They got the idea from a fan’s post on the band’s Facebook page: You’ve had this band name for years, it read, why not use it during these hard times as a lyric?
“It was a call to action,” said Nguyen, who wrote the song in his apartment with the help of his wife, Paloma Nguyen, in the weeks leading up to the birth of their first child, Zoe, this month.
Then, Nguyen started recording in his home studio. His drummer played a track, and he added more from each musician in the band.
“Initially, this was a band thing, but then I realized this is a lot bigger than the band,”
Nguyen recalled. “This has to potential to be a bigger PSA.”
He messaged colleagues in New York, Philadelphia, Minnesota, Los Angeles and Houston, asking if other doctors would be willing to record themselves singing along.
“The videos started trickling in,” Nguyen said.
Dr. Manish Shah, pediatric neurosurgeon at Children’s Memorial Hermann Hospital and UTHealth, steals the scene, singing along while playing his sitar. “I thought, ‘I’ve got to add my own flair,’ so I did,” he said.
Shah has been playing sitar since he was 16 and is learning guitar. When Nguyen joined his team last summer, it was the perfect fit.
“He’s such a brilliant surgeon and a great doctor,” Shah said.
“It was such a coup.”
Nguyen texted Shah the music and asked him to join in the video. “We’re never too busy here to help a friend,” Shah said.
The doctor has since caught himself singing the music in the shower — and he hopes it becomes a subliminal message for others, too.
“Collectively, if we as individuals act together, we’ll have a huge success,” Shah said. “If we have individuals who don’t play for the team, it won’t work.
That’s just the way this pandemic is playing out.”
Sending that message through song is more effective, Shah added. “It’s so much better than lecturing people,” he said. “Staying at home really does make a difference.”
All of the stars of the music video are working day in and day out to combat the coronavirus. “This is so frightening,” Nguyen said. “It particularly hits home when you see friends and colleagues start to get sick.”
At the same time, he said, the shortage of protective gear for health care workers is like sending soldiers into battle without armor. Promoting the link for the national coalition GetUsPPE to get protective gear for those on the front lines is also an important part of the music video’s message.
“Awareness is a big thing,” Nguyen said. “And the medium of music is a big way to spread awareness.”
Music and medicine have both been major forces in Nguyen’s life. Growing up in Minneapolis, he loved science and anatomy. He remembers enjoying the Vietnamese folk songs his father played and then discovering Guns N’ Roses at age 8. At 13, Nguyen broke his collarbone right at the beginning of summer. So he learned guitar.
“I didn’t have anywhere to go that summer,” Nguyen said. “I was in a brace the entire time.”
It paid off; by high school, he was in his own rock band. “It was terrible, but we thought we were pretty good at the time,” he laughed.
He balanced a love of music with medicine.
“Medicine was a venue, a way I could give back,” he said. “We are a refugee family, and I knew growing up that I had an opportunity here I would not have otherwise.”
While he was in medical school, he continued writing music. He realized that practice made perfect. “These songs may not be that good, but if I don’t keep at it, they’ll never get better,” he told himself then.
Now he has nine albums under his belt. “Music is my way of expression and understanding what’s happening in the world,” he said. “It’s probably the only way I know how to interpret things, how to process them.”
Nguyen has been visiting Vietnam for the past few years with the Reconstructive International Cooperative Exchange (RICE), a medical and educational mission founded by plastic surgeon Dr. Joseph Rosen.
“I work side by side with Vietnamese surgeons,” Nguyen said. “We’re not teaching a man to fish. We’re going fishing together.”
Last December, he founded the nonprofit Nuoy with his colleague Julien Klaudt-Moreau to continue the work in Vietnam. Nguyen describes Nuoy as a rebranding and evolution of RICE, adding more efforts for education, research and partnerships with other like-minded humanitarian groups.
“We want to make ourselves obsolete,” he said. “Nothing would make me happier than to see my own country doing these operations and not needing me around anymore.”
Nguyen and 40 volunteers were scheduled to travel to Vietnam with RICE in early March — but had to cancel the trip when COVID-19 data started pouring in. When he made the call, most of the cases were still in China, but 24 hours before the flight, cases escalated in South Korea and Japan.
“We were at risk of not being able to get out or being quarantined,” Nguyen said. “We could also potentially be the cause of coronavirus spreading. That was unconscionable — to hurt the ones we’re trying to help.”
Since then, the number of cases has exploded in the U.S. Physicians he knows, especially in New York at the pandemic’s epicenter, are working around the clock — and he wants to do his part to help those in the medical field.
“Everyone is working every day,” he said. “This is real. These people are real people with families.”
Nguyen asks that everyone “stay at home. Help the doctor.”