WHAT'S APP DOC?
Would you trust a medical pro who posts selfies? A new generation of doctors and nurses are social-media stars
FASHION and beauty influencers have been earning fame, and a living, on social media for some time. Now, medical professionals are joining Instagram, TikTok and YouTube to get their brands out there, as well as take in some extra cash.
Dr. Mike Varshavski, also known as the Hot Doctor, has 3.5 million followers on Instagram, and nearly 5 million on YouTube. “It’s an educational platform,” he says of his dive into social media.
“It’s almost like subliminal learning. You might be laughing at memes, but really I’m explaining what pneumothorax is,” he says, referring to a collapsed lung. “I’m going to put the most medically accurate, evidence-based information out there.”
The 30-year-old physician lives in Hell’s Kitchen, dates models and brings in seven figures a year through appearances, promotions and ads placed on his oft-trending videos. He practices half of the week at Chatham Family Medicine in New Jersey and insists he keeps his appointments focused on health. “Someone will ask for a picture here and there, and I always say we’ll do that on the way out,” says Varshavski.
The doctors and nurses who are giving advice and hawking products, from fitness wares to protein bars, see their selfies and
online presence as a public service. But the old guard is wary of the implications of “following” your doc.
“If you want to endorse things like, ‘I love this movie,’ I would take my MD out of it,” says Arthur Caplan, director of the Division of Medical Ethics at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine. But despite the gray zones and landmines that come along with medical influencing, nurses, docs and the chic-scrubs firm
Figs are convinced the future of physicians is online.
“Figs sends me scrubs every month,” says Sarah Flanagan, a 22-year-old nurse in Florida with 35,800 Instagram followers. Flanagan went on a three-night, four-day trip to Ojai, Calif., that was sponsored by Figs and Lululemon and featured yoga classes and professional-growth sessions at the five-star Ojai Valley Inn.
“Influencers for the beauty industry go on all of these fancy vacations with brands, and these things happen in the medical world, too,” says the nurse. “I only have to post [about Figs] once a month” and she gives her followers a code to use for a discount.
“One of the amazing benefits of social media is that medical professionals can show their whole selves,” says Jenny Seyfried, a VP of marketing at Figs. “In addition to being professionals, they’re people. They watch ‘The Bachelor’ just like us.”
But Caplan says practitioners’ relationships with companies like Figs, which recently came out with Light Side and Dark Side scrub sets in a “Star Wars” collection, are “cheapening medicine”: “We’re not here to put on a fashion show,” he says.
Flanagan started blogging a year ago while struggling to land her dream job (she was hoping to be a neonatal nurse, but ended up in an observational unit for stroke victims), and says she has to tread a fine line when deciding whether to take promotional deals. She works with brands such as the plant-based smoothie company Daily Harvest, Skout Organic protein bars and a sleepaid drink called Som Sleep. Her promos bring in $5,000 a year plus free products, but she says she could be earning a lot more.
“I don’t do the flat tummy tea or the hair vitamins because I’m a nurse and people would take my opinion way more seriously,” says Flanagan. Ditto Doctor Mike: He sees himself as an antidote to controversial wellness site Goop, adding, “I’ve gotten pitched on weight-loss supplements, antibacterial bed sheets, a TV show that will say, ‘Let’s do CAT scans on everybody to try and catch cancer early,’ and all that crosses medical lines.”
While Flanagan and Varshavski say the criticism they receive is mainly from folks they consider out of touch, who see their online presence as unprofessional or think they’re selling out, others have lost their jobs for posting.
This past December, Dr. Jay Feldman, an Orlando-based physician, left his residency at AdventHealth after a series of insensitive tweets were uncovered. One detailed his “solid day . . . watch[ing] my patient code and die.” Feldman, who still has more than 103,000 followers on Instagram, also pushed supplement company Rave Doctor, which sells hangover “cures” to partiers.
This year on TikTok — the platform that houses 30- to 60-second videos, mostly of lip-syncs and dances — the user Nurse Holly drew ire for promoting abstinence as “the best way to prevent STDs.” Flanagan posted a video in response to Holly, that called her out for showing her “bias” and “acting a fool on [her] large platform,” and it likewise went viral. “Thousands of creeps were in my mentions calling me a whore,” recalls Flanagan. “It was so scary.”
Kamilah Evans, a Yonkersbased third-year medical student who blogs under the handle Med School Milah, has learned from these highly publicized episodes. “I heard about a nurse that got fired for showing her badge in pictures. I deleted every post that I may have had a badge in,” Evans tells The Post. “It’s unfortunate that we have to learn from other people’s demise.” The doc-in-training prides herself on mentoring students who have dreams of being a doctor — she says her followers are mostly young black women — but she’s careful to never give medical advice.
“An IUD company reached out to me. They knew I was into women’s health and they wanted me to talk about my experience with birth control. I’m interested in being an OB-GYN so I thought this was the perfect collaboration,” says Evans.
But she pulled back: “I thought, ‘Whoa, this is sponsored by a pharmaceutical company’ . . .I realized how it could be seen that I was pushing a certain birth control over another. And that’s fine as a doctor, but only in a one-toone setting after going through a patient’s medical history.”
With no clear policy — “most of my colleagues who are older have no idea what an influencer is,” says Caplan — influencers like Evans are left to their intuition about what’s right. As a catchall, Caplan says, “you don’t want to cheapen the medical degree by abusing it to bless things that have nothing to do with medicine and evidence.” But that outlook may be missing a crucial aspect of docs’ lives outside of work.
Evans says she hopes to keep mentoring and promoting after she graduates. “I’ll continue partnering with brands that are safe and fun,” like her previous work with Tampax and Vaseline. “It would be so cool if I could pay off my loans from Instagram.” What’s more, she thinks it’s important to show her whole self, with her lab coat on and otherwise, to prove doctors are “normal people.”
“I talk about it all,” she says. “It’s not just about how to study and highlight your notes. It’s about how you get over stupid men when you’re in medical school.”