Internet Doctors Are Worsening Health Anxiety

The internet has been known to have a little nook and cranny for every niche interest out there. People who express their interests in fun and engaging ways sometimes get popular for talking about their interests, which has given rise to some very specific content doing well on the web. We have people all over the world sharing their knowledge on topics like food science, make-up, leopard-gecko rearing, and not least of all, actual board-certified doctors sharing medical advice on the internet.

Doctor Mike

One of those board-certified doctors, and perhaps one of the most popular ones out there, is Russian-American YouTube personality Mikhail Varshavski, most commonly known as Doctor Mike. He first gained popularity from his Instagram page, where he began posting pictures of himself and his dog living their day-to-day life. Through that, he built his image as the hot doctor with the cute Husky. Later, he started his YouTube channel, to which he now posts edutainment videos, reacting to medical TikToks and memes, or discussing current topics on health and well-being. The Husky, named Roxy, now lives with Mike’s father while Mike has acquired two ultra-cute Newfoundland dogs, named Bear and Rib.

I am not immune to a handsome and charming internet personality. Doctor Mike is the first channel I look for when I need low-stakes, wholesome and fun content to drift off to sleep to. I also feel like I learn quite a lot from his content. Where else would I learn where the anterior tibial artery is located? Who else was going to tell me how candles compare to cigarettes in terms of lung damage? And what about the dangers of a bezoar (you’re welcome) forming in my stomach? Thank God that Doctor Mike has made me aware of these things.

Health anxiety

Though Doctor Mike’s content is very entertaining and provides something nice to watch when winding down, I’ve also come to experience some of the negative effects of constantly consuming health-focused content. When I first discovered Mike’s channel, I became so enamoured with him that his content would be pretty much all I ever watched on YouTube. At a certain point I had seen every single one of his videos, so every time I’d watch one of his videos it would be a rewatch of something I’d seen before. For some reason, I started paying a lot of attention to the videos where he would discuss skin cancer, or really any type of cancer. I’m a very pale person, I’ve experienced two or three really bad sunburns as a kid, and I have an irregular mole pattern. I started getting more and more fearful that I had cancer and if I didn’t go to a doctor right now to get fully checked out, I was surely going to die within the next month.

I knew that this anxiety was somewhat unreasonable, and that it was most likely caused by the insane amount of Doctor Mike videos I had been watching. I decided to blacklist his channel from my YouTube homepage, so that I wouldn’t get his videos recommended anymore and I would only watch them when a new one came out. To calm my nerves, I did actually go see my general practitioner about a mole on my leg that I was genuinely a little bit concerned about. He looked at it for maybe three seconds, and told me I had nothing to worry about. I made use of the visit by asking him about some of the things I had heard Doctor Mike say about skin cancer; my GP reassured me on a lot of these topics and I skipped home merrily.

A vicious cycle

These days I control the amount of Doctor Mike I consume on a daily basis. I only watch his videos during the evening, and I actively try not to overthink the things he mentions in his videos. I managed to catch my health anxiety before it became really bad and took the right steps to stop it in its tracks, but I imagine that it won’t be like that for everyone. Some people might be more prone to getting super anxious, and some people may not be aware that it’s even a problem or what’s causing it. I think that for people with a lot of health anxiety, medical content on the internet can feel like something that’s helpful; it helps them to be informed and tells them what to look out for when it comes to their wellbeing. However, it might be having an adverse effect, where the more medical information they take in, the more anxious they become. The more anxious they become, the more they’ll want to know about whatever medical problem they’re imagining they’re facing, the more medical content they’ll want to consume. In this way, online medical content like Doctor Mike’s channel can have a very negative effect on people’s wellbeing and feed into a vicious cycle.

Though Doctor Mike does uphold the motto of “alert, not anxious”, it seems like health anxiety caused by online medical content isn’t discussed by very many professionals online, and neither are strategies on how to deal with it. Also, it might be hard for people (like me) to draw the line between being alert and being anxious. I often find myself wondering if my worries are based in reality or completely unreasonable. On top of all of this, medical influencers on the internet may be inadvertently profiting off of people’s health anxiety, due to the vicious cycle that I mentioned.