Doctor Mike Is One of Our Best Hopes for Restoring Trust in Medicine
It’s not every day that you see your general practitioner in a high-contrast thumbnail with his mouth agape, next to a woman in a trap from Saw, with the title: “Doctor Reacts to SAW Movie ‘Injuries,’” but for Dr. Mikhail Varshavski, a.k.a. “Doctor Mike,” that’s all part of the plan. Over the last decade, the sharp-jawed doctor with an athletic physique has built his personal brand on decoding the medical world for the average person, and a crucial part of that is starring in the most search-and-algorithm-friendly content possible. Thanks to his expansive media empire, you have likely seen the 36-year-old pop up in your feed whether you follow him or not. Every week, he posts some combination of an interview, special report, or viral clips to his over 30 million followers across YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. That includes dissecting medical dramas like The Pitt and Grey’s Anatomy, explainers on everything from hormone therapy to avoiding Disney rash, and a podcast, The Checkup, which has featured former vice president Kamala Harris and Sanjay Gupta (all the while maintaining his own clinical practice.) No matter the format or topic, Dr. Varshavski’s videos feel like a safe space to ask questions and get curious about medical phenomena and public health discourse.
That feeling of goodwill is hard to come by these days. Nearly half of US adults struggle with health care costs, according to the independent policy research organization KFF. Meanwhile, trust in the quality of health care has been continually declining since 2001, according to a 2024 Gallup poll. It does not help that our country’s Department of Health and Human Services is run by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a health mystic who has done quick work to sow distrust of the very public health institutions he oversees based on often unfounded superstitions. As the influence of online personalities and conspiracists on our own personal health decisions has also grown stronger, a crop of influencer doctors have stepped up to meet them, filling a gap in medical knowledge usually only afforded by the wealthy or well-insured. Dr. Varshavski is the most preeminent example of what that new “social media physician” looks like. In an era where medicine is increasingly politicized and attention is the currency by which health care organizations and treatment providers wield influence, his social media empire is the blueprint of a new medical establishment—one born and bred online.
“We’re there for our patients everywhere: inpatient, outpatient, ER, [in the] nursing home…social media was just that next frontier,” says Dr. Varshavski.
Dr. Varshavski may have never sat down in front of a camera, or even entered the medical profession if it weren’t for the fact that his father, Oskar, became an osteopath in the United States after fleeing Russia in 1995. Growing up in a cramped one-bedroom apartment in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, he saw his father take English lessons and work toward his medical degree in his 40s. As a kid, Dr. Varshavski loved watching his dad field a wide variety of clinical interactions. “It was definitely a unique upbringing,” he says.
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