YouTube Personality ‘Doctor Mike’ Finally Gets Taken Seriously

WASHINGTON — It’s a moment “Doctor Mike” Varshavski still describes as both a blessing and a curse.

Here he was, a young doctor in the middle of his residency in 2015, when thanks to his presence on Instagram, he found himself in the pages of People magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive” issue.

“I was already getting known as someone who battled medical misinformation, thanks to my social media presence, and suddenly, this totally superficial thing came along,” Varshavski said during a conversation with The Well News.

“Suddenly, all the major TV networks are calling, and I’m thinking, this is great, here’s an opportunity to help further my message, but what I discovered was that because I came at what I considered a very serious topic from the world of pop culture and social media, I was less respected somehow,” he said.

As an example, Varshavski pointed to what he described as “one of the entertainment shows” that invited him to ostensibly appear to talk about the benefits of exercise.

“So I walked on the set, and they said, ‘Okay, remove your shirt and let’s start working out.’ 

“I said, ‘Why would you ask a doctor to do that? It doesn’t make sense.’ And I walked off the show,” he said.

But the experience also became a moment of reckoning. Yes, he had to concede, he did have a kind of “weird” relationship with the media, but also a wakeup call to up his game when it came to the educational content he was offering viewers over the internet.

“This didn’t happen overnight,” he said of the YouTube channel and other activities that have easily made him the bête noire of health misinformation on the web. “And it continues to evolve.

“I mean, I see myself as being very much in this middle ground,” Varshavski continued. “At the end of the day, what I’m trying to be is an expert in this particular area of health-related misinformation and have the media focus on what we’re doing.

“But what I’ve found through experience is that the media oftentimes does not see me as an expert because I’m on the pop culture side of things, and the pop culture people don’t take me seriously as one of their own.

“It’s hard to find one’s identity in the media space right now,” he said.

Varshavski will get a chance to do just that when he speaks at the National Press Club on Friday, May 30.

The Headliners event will begin with dinner in the club’s ballroom at 8 p.m. and will be followed, at 8:30 p.m., by a Q&A with National Press Club President Mike Balsamo. Tickets are now on sale.

For those who have been under a proverbial social media rock or who fear to tread the ever-expanding pod-o-sphere, Varshavski’s story starts in Russia, where his family emigrated to the United States from when he was just 6 years old.

Though their early years in the states were challenging, Varshavski began to get an inkling of his calling at an early age by watching his father, a doctor, interact with patients.

Soon, while still in his teens, he began helping his high school friends deal with various sports-related injuries.

It was during this period that people first began calling him “Doctor Mike.”

Upon graduation, he enrolled at the New York Institute of Technology and was accepted for an accelerated, seven-year combined track for a bachelor’s degree in life sciences and a Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine degree upon completion of the undergraduate program. 

In 2014, he started a residency at Atlantic Health System’s Overlook Medical Center’s Family Medicine program, which he completed in 2017, and a year later he joined Chatham Family Medicine, a family practice with Atlantic Health System, in Chatham, New Jersey.

All the while Varshavski had another, parallel life online.

It began in early 2012 when Varshavski joined Instagram to document his life as a medical student and combat the notion that “you can’t have a life in medical school.”

As part of his side gig, Varshavski decided to use his social media presence to provide health information to millennials.

His intent, he has said, was to highlight the importance of health literacy while simultaneously battling the abundant medical misinformation one can easily find online.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Varshavski reconfigured his YouTube videos to answer people’s questions about the virus. Among his guests during this period was Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

With his popularity continuing to grow, in 2022 he launched a health-related podcast on his YouTube channel named “The Checkup with Doctor Mike.” 

The podcast covers subjects related to sexual health, mental health, physical health and social health. Varshavski has interviewed friends, medical professionals, athletes, comedians and actors. 

At present, the board-certified family medicine physician, media personality, educator, writer and philanthropist has over 25 million followers on YouTube.

“Basically, I saw a situation where people were getting health information from a whole host of unreliable providers,” Varshavski said. “I mean, just look at the internet — there’s no shortage of people out there spreading conspiracy theories, and during COVID especially, these conspiracists created a lot of distrust, which was then making its way through circles of friends, families and other social circles.

“On the other side of the coin was me, a young doctor, a voice on YouTube that was giving out correct information and trying to do my best to fact check the bad information that was out there,” he said.

With 2 million followers on Instagram and his profile raised significantly by People magazine, Varshavski quickly drew the attention of producers. He signed with one, only to see it lose interest.

He responded by hiring his own small team and started churning out professional-looking educational content for himself.

“If there was a gamble it was in thinking, ‘I’ve got 2 million Instagram followers, I wonder what would happen if we invited them over to YouTube to see this video we made,’” he said. “I saw that step as an opportunity to continue to grow the mission, and we’ve done that quite successfully.”

By the time COVID imposed itself on the national and international consciousness, Varshavski was well-established enough on social media that the Fox Business network asked him to do weekly appearances on its “Mornings with Maria” program.

“My stance during that period was the same as it had always been,” he said. “I may not be providing breaking news and enticing clicks, but what I am going to do is provide you with verified information you can trust.

“In essence, to be frank, I was taking the same messaging that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was providing, and putting it forward in a relatable way, making it easy to understand, and hopefully, calming people’s anxieties,” he continued.

Varshavski said he was shocked by how many people were tuning in, but says, “it was phenomenal to be able to be the voice that was providing accurate, unbiased information, and we were doing it with a level of transparency that surpassed that, even, of some of the larger health agencies.”

Varshavski said if there’s one mistake people make when they talk about social media and the internet, it’s that they “underestimate how many reasonable people are out there looking for and watching content in search of good information they can easily understand.”

“I mean, you’re always going to have the conspiracy theorists and the people who disbelieve anything a doctor or a large agency or the government says, and that’s sad, but it’s a fact. The reality is there are a lot of groups online and it almost comes down to whoever you give the microphone to at a specific moment, that’s the only person the general public is going to hear,” he said.

“Right now, for instance, I think you’re seeing an amplification of the conspiracy theorists and the anti-vaxxers and the like, simply because RFK Jr. is in the position he’s in [as Health and Human Services director].

“That said, I think the audience that we’ve cultivated is an audience that wants to know the truth. They believe that I’ve been telling them the truth because they’ve watched my content for nearly a decade. They see me tell them the truth during COVID, after COVID, in between COVID, we have content even now, highlighting our failures with COVID, talking about areas where we could have done better,” Varshavski said.

“I think that, all together, fosters a sense of trust, where you have millions of people tuning in, week in and week out, and engaging with topics that can be very broad,” he said. “For instance, in addition to the health stuff, we now have content about my dogs. We have content on cars, lifestyle things.

“Of course, the people who tune in know exactly what they’re going to get because they’ve seen it for an incredibly long period of time,” he said.

Because he mentioned Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Varshavski was asked what he thinks of the Make America Healthy Again movement and the new emphasis on prevention as opposed to treatment.

“I think it’s a false dichotomy. You don’t need to choose between prevention and treatment. People will still get sick, even if you have great prevention,” he said. 

“Why is that? It’s because 50%, if we’re being generous with our knowledge, is outside of our control, and 50% perhaps is under our control. You can’t change how old you are. You can’t change what your family genetics are, and as a result, you have a situation where people will always get sick,” Varshavski said.

“People like RFK Jr. will frequently weaponize the fact that people are sick with chronic diseases. We have a higher level of chronic diseases than ever before. And if you’re a true scientist, you know that the reasons for this are multifactorial,” he continued.

“A lot of them are due to the fact that we consume ultra-processed foods at a very high level. We have developed some bad habits about not exercising as much, carrying more weight, and all of that makes us less healthy, and when people think less healthy, they think heart disease. Yes, that’s true. But if you’re less healthy, your immune system is less healthy, and when your immune system is less healthy, you’re more susceptible to having bad outcomes from the flu, from COVID, from other infections,” he said.

“As a result, you have a population out there that’s seeing these numbers and wanting answers, and we come up against the same problem of perception that I spoke about earlier,” Varshavski said. 

“Scientists are very honest about what we know and what we don’t know, so they don’t give a great answer. But then you have someone coming in with ultra-confidence, making promises that they will Make America Healthy Again, showing the statistics of chronic diseases going up, blaming it on a specific food ingredient, and it sounds a lot simpler than it actually is. It’s painting a false reality,” he said.

But Varshavski wasn’t done with his criticism of the health secretary.

“What I find most interesting about all the messaging is that while he states that he is very pro-patient and wants people empowered, all of the messaging — if you really dig into the heart of it — is actually quite blaming.

“It’s more focused on blaming patients, on saying that if you have a disease, it’s because of what you ate, it’s because of what you did, it’s because of what you didn’t do. Whereas, true modern medicine is more balanced in this regard,” he said. “We say, yes, lifestyle matters; yes, we can make some changes; but there are also pharmaceutical approaches and therapeutics that we can use … to help you feel better.

“In other words, it’s not one or the other, it’s a combination, and how that combination stacks up needs to be individualized for the patient,” Varshavski said.

Dan can be reached at [email protected] and @DanMcCue