Dr Mike: The Hidden Side Effects Of Vaping! The Dark Side Of Being A Doctor! We Need To Stop Medical Misinformation!

Steven Bartlett (0:00)

Your mission at the moment to myth bust and call out disinformation as it relates to health care. Let's get into that.

Dr. Mike Varshavski (0:06)

Okay.

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Dr. Mike Varshavski.

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He's the actively practicing medicine doctor with over 25 million followers.

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Who's created one of the largest health education platforms in the world.

Steven Bartlett (0:17)

Dr. Mike, what's the key to finding a diet that's going to stick?

Dr. Mike Varshavski (0:21)

There's two real things that you need to think about. One, calories in and calories out is true. Second, and this is important, you need to have.

Steven Bartlett (0:29)

What about the prevailing narrative that if you want to lose weight you've got to get on a running machine?

Dr. Mike Varshavski (0:32)

Nutrition, that's where the majority of the change will come from.

Steven Bartlett (0:36)

What's the medical advantage if I go to the gym every day?

Dr. Mike Varshavski (0:38)

Literally everything else.

Steven Bartlett (0:40)

Is vaping dangerous?

Dr. Mike Varshavski (0:41)

Yes, and no one knows this, by the way, this is why I do what I do. But the more dangerous part of it is…

Steven Bartlett (0:45)

What's your POV on supplements?

Dr. Mike Varshavski (0:47)

They will make you skip on doing things that are healthy for you, and supplements have side effects. You have too many of them, we notice that they… But no one talks about that because you can't really sell them.

Steven Bartlett (0:57)

And then, considering you care so much about your health, why would a doctor choose boxing?

Dr. Mike Varshavski (1:01)

Because I unfortunately lost my mom to cancer. To ask the doctors to stop doing chest compressions on your mom, that is not something that I wish on anyone. And I got into a very unhealthy mental state. So boxing chose me instead of me choosing boxing.

Steven Bartlett (1:17)

In the circumstances that you lost your mother, where she was given the all clear?

Dr. Mike Varshavski (1:22)

Yeah.

Steven Bartlett (1:23)

Did that experience change your perspective of the medical industry in any way? Dr. Mike, considering everything you do from your podcast, to all of the content you produce across your channels, to the stuff you do in TV, everything, social media, all of it, how do you summarize the overarching mission that you're on in this phase of your life?

Dr. Mike Varshavski (1:56)

The mission is largely to make sure that in the sea of misinformation, my patients, my viewers, are getting the most honest, transparent and engaging information, so that hopefully they can make the best decisions health care-wise for themselves and their family members.

Steven Bartlett (2:18)

Why do you care?

Dr. Mike Varshavski (2:20)

When I was a medical student, I would go into rooms with patients and they would be being seen by some of the top doctors in the world. I mean, experts upon experts, credentials, published work, and the second the doctor would walk out after presenting all this accurate, evidence-based information, the patient would look at me as the med student and say, what did he say? Or what did she say? And I realized that the message wasn't hitting home. And I realized we need to do a better job as communicators in the health care space. And then I said, well, TV must be the answer, media training must be the answer. And then as I became a practicing physician in my residency program, I started seeing people being influenced by those TV physicians in the wrong ways. They would be promising miracle solutions to any problem. They would be having snake oil being sold to them. They would think that they can skip out on taking their medications or going for treatments or making lifestyle changes because of a solution proposed to them for three easy payments of 1999

And I said, oh man, not only are we not great communicators, but we're being out-edged by people who are trying to make a profit in this health care space. And I viewed it as a mega problem. I remember in 2017, I wrote a blog post for the American Academy of Family Physicians. And I said, the lack of evidence-based physicians online is going to create a world of a difference in our patients' lives. It's going to allow misinformation to come in, especially in this section I call the gray zone, where modern science doesn't yet have an answer to certain medical problems, to certain medical conditions. And they're going to come in and promise you solutions. And they're going to be quite successful at it. What happened three years later? COVID-19 pandemic, misinformation pandemic, people confused, not knowing who to seek out for information. And for some very strange reason, a doctor with only five years of experience after a residency was the number one channel on YouTube being watched and giving the answers when people were not watching the CDC. They weren't listening to true experts. Instead, they were falling for misinformation online. And I had to be there to set the record straight. I couldn't believe that that happened.