The MOST DANGEROUS Medical Advice To Avoid | DoctorMike

Get ready to learn from one of the most influential medical personalities on the internet. Wait, wait, I was supposed to say that. That's so stupid. Dr. Mike is a board-certified family physician and social media personality who rose to fame after being named the sexiest doctor alive in 2015. With a passion for promoting health and wellness, he's used his platform to educate and inspire millions of people around the world. And today, you'll get to hear his thoughts along with some really dangerous medical advice that you'll need to watch out for. when they would look at certain supplements like protein powders, they would find like heavy metal toxicity in them because they're not carefully monitored. Did he check out your lumps? How about this? You're going to have to subscribe to find out if he checks out Graham's lumps. Just subscribe. Thank you guys so much. And now, let's begin. See Mr. Beast's last video. I did. I did. Epic video. What do you think about that? I think it's going to start a new like entire genre on YouTube. for him venturing into health is really exciting because what I think he has the ability to do is bring awareness from the average person's mindset of what's wrong with our health care system. And if you change enough minds and you educate enough minds, you can actually get the government to fix some of the huge problems we have. What exactly was wrong with the eye? My understanding was that there was like a like a a liquid or something that could be sucked out. Yeah. Basically what it is is uh it's cataract uh induced vision blurriness which can be so bad that it can lead to blindness essentially and uh cataracts is like a haziness of the lens of of the eye which you could actually take the lens out and put an artificial lens in and it's a quick procedure like you you saw in his video. It's six minutes six minutes. Yep. Does it fix it forever? Um I should clarify it's 6 to 10 minutes depending on but whatever. It's very quick. It's a minutes procedure. Um, and it's very fast. Is it expensive as well? I have no idea about the cost because it's not a procedure I do. I I wouldn't even know how to price it. I was actually curious that myself when he was doing it. I was shocked it was only he said I think he said 10 minutes. Yeah. Is that something that people have to be put under for or like how how do you operate on the eyes? It's a mild sedation. The lowest amount of sedation you can get. The reason why I say that is because as a primary care doctor, I do pre-operative clearances to make sure that people are safe going in for surgery. And a lot of times eye doctors will send me their patients before they go for surgery. A lot of times it's someone older. And like there's not much you do for that surgery because it's such a lowrisk procedure. It's so quick. It's outpatient. They're not under anesthesia for hours at a time. It's minutes. So the the risk of anything going wrong is very low. So there's very little that I can do to prepare them to be in the best scenario. But what do they see when this surgery is going uh like underway? How how does that work that someone's like able to look at their eye and they don't move their eye? Um well my assumption is that they're sedated but it's again it's not a procedure that I would do. It's an opthalmology procedure. So what ex what type of procedures do did you do or do you do? So being primary care uh I work in an outpatient medical center. Obviously, I'm trained to perform surgery. Like, my medical license in New York and New Jersey is both for medical and surgical, but unless you're in a bind, you don't want me performing your surgery because I didn't do my uh residency in surgery, meaning that I didn't get the extra hands-on hours in the operating room. Um, so the the the minor surgeries that I do are skin procedures, biopsies, INDs, which are like incision and drainage of an abscess, ingrown toenail removal, very superficial things like I'm not going to be doing an epidetomy or uh I don't know, some kind of colon procedure. So it's more outpatient based stuff that your primary doctor. How did you get started? Did you always know you wanted to be a doctor? You know, for me, I fell in love with medicine because my father was a doctor in Russia and when we came to the States, he had to redo medical school and residency and I was 10 years old. So, I was awake, if you will, during that time into seeing what he's doing. Most kids are so young when their parents are in medical school that they don't know what the whole whole process is like. But for me, I witnessed it from day one, his first day of going into medical school till his residency days to becoming a doctor to starting his own practice. And I fell in love with it. I said, "This is what I want to do." It fit my skill set real well. I loved science. It was like the only subject I really would pay attention to in class. And I said, "That's that's the field for me." Do you ever get queasy when you see blood or like There's one thing that makes me queasy. What is it? Watching someone gag. Really? Do you start gagging, too? Yes. That's a thing. I know people that like they feel like they need to like vomit or whatever if someone else does. Why? Why is that? Why is that a thing? No idea. I've been in a room where there's massive blood loss. I've plugged massive blood loss. Uh there's excrement in rooms that I've been in and there's no issue for me. But then like if I'm putting on a nasogastric tube for a patient, which is a tube that's supposed to go from your nose and then you insert it and it goes into the stomach, whether you're trying to like wash the area out if there's a bleed or if there's an obstruction and you're trying to pull contents out of the stomach, but you you're putting this tube in, sometimes the tube will coil in the mouth, triggering the gag reflex. And when I'm doing that for a patient, if it triggers that gag reflex in them, for me, I almost like start gagging and throwing. Have you ever gagged and like Yes, it was really bad. The patient was like, "Oh, whoa. What?" Like, "Uh, the patient was not fully there." Like, they were a little bit out of it based on their medical condition. So, they didn't realize it, but the co-resident I was working with, my senior resident, saw me and was like, "Are you okay?" I'm like, "No, no, I'm good." And I was able to fight through it. But I feel it like I don't It's not controllable really. I get so queasy and so just like lightaded if I see blood or your own blood or anyone's anyone's interesting. Anything. uh anything where like if someone were on an operating room, I wouldn't I would have an out-of- body experience. I couldn't comprehend what's going on. Okay. Yeah. Like I think that's a person right there on that table. Like their their life is in these other person's hands. Anything goes wrong like that's that's their whole life has led up to that point. I just can't conceptualize that. Yeah. It it is scary being in that moment. The the thing is when you're a practicing physician, you have so many hours and times that you were in there. And remember the first times you're in there, you're in there as a medical student just observing. So you have no real job. So you kind of go in there just observing. Then you're going in and maybe you're assisting holding a tool or hold holding the surgical field open. Then you're going in and now you're a resident and you're actually assisting in doing the procedure. Then you're being the senior doctor overseeing the procedure. The the mantra that we have is see one, do one, teach one. And that's kind of how surgery is learned. So, by the time you're actually responsible for that person's life, you've done this so many times that usually the nerves are gone at that point. Got it. I'm with you on the blood loss thing. Like, that for me freaks me out. So, I took Accutane when I was in high school and you need to get your blood drawn. I think it's like once every month or so to monitor all of your levels and everything. And I was on it for 5 months and I went in once because I was so scared. I was just like, "Oh, you know, I can't come in." Like something came up. Had to get your blood drawn. Yeah. You had to get your blood drawn. And you were worried about it. And I was worried and I literally skipped out to the point where they're like, "Hey, we got to like we can't keep you on Accutane if you're just going to keep skipping out on your blood appointments." And I was like, "H like I was like, "All right, I'll I'll show you." You still have that problem now? Yes. I was actually going to get my blood drawn before this New York trip and I was going to go with my housemate. Then they decided to go with their girlfriend and so I decided not to go. But I needed to get my blood drawn really badly. I just went had my blood drawn like two weeks ago. I would have I wish we could have gone together. How was that for you? Uh easy. And I get so weirded out by it. Like what if you don't look? Uh I start sweating. I start the idea of it. It's not like whether or not like the pain is no pain. Yeah. Feels like a little pinch, but it's the idea of what's going on and I think about it. Yeah. I I just don't know why they need to take so much. It's like don't you think that it's actually not much at all. Yeah. But like when you're thinking about a pint or something, there's no pint. No one's taking a pint for Accutane. It's like a gallon. That's donating blood. Okay. Well, if they're still taking like what do they call vial, right? I feel like inside a vial is like 5 mls, which is like a teaspoon. Oh, it's not that bad actually. Okay. So, I thought it was like I thought it was like a full on tube of or a tablespoon. But yeah, it's not much. All right. That's That's not too bad. I still feel like they could only just like give you a little prick on your finger and then just like, you know, extract it. Well, that's if you're doing like a blood sugar check, you can do that. But otherwise, you need a little bit more blood. I'm actually on the same team as Dr. Mike. I only get qu I only gag when other people gag and uh I wanted to be I I wanted to do like EMT when I was in high school and I actually watched an open heart surgery. Whoa. Yeah, that was that's scary. That's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. What do you mean you watched an open heart like in person or? Yeah. We went to go look. Are you serious? Yeah. Yeah. There's like operating bays with they call them theaters where like on the top that you could sit and watch or maybe on the side and you're protected and it's still anyone watch or No, it's generally reserved for students or like educational purposes. Yeah. And what about the person? Is that something that they consent to? Okay. So, it's not just like you're just like surprisingly wheeled into a room with like a fish aquarium. You wake up person is consented. Also remember if you're getting a surgery in like a university hospital odds are it's a teaching hospital and in a teaching hospital you're going to have other people in the room. Do you find it safer to go to a teaching hospital because there's so many people on it. I think it depends what you're going for. If you have a very complex issue, yes, because odds are they're going to be the ones doing research on this very complex issue. Um and then also a lot of the research hospitals are the ones that are like level one trauma centers. So if something really bad happens, you end up in those places. That's interesting. I represented a client who was a I think he went to USC, but he got very good at treating gunshots and that was one of the things where uh for people to learn uh of how to treat like instant wounds and stuff like that. That was one of the best places and and he Interesting. Yeah. Went into medicine. Yeah. Like one of my friends, he's an ER doctor. He recently finished his residency training. He did an extra stint in Baltimore where there was unfortunately a lot of shootings and gang violence. So he would come back with stories of knowing how to treat stabbings, accidents, shootings, gunshot wounds, and it's unfortunate, but it's also given him a lot of education and value to bring back to his patients here. And um you see in those worst areas how much education happens and how terrible it is. But first, we got to thank today's sponsor, Streamyard, of which doing it on my own today because Jack is not here. I have no idea where he is. I've tried texting him multiple times. Hasn't got back to me. So uh here we are. Oh my gosh, guys. I'm late to film the StreamYard sponsor again. I'm going to be in so much trouble. I really hope Graham doesn't start without me. Uh, stay tuned to the end of the sponsor to see if I can make it on time. Anyway, if Jack was here, I would tell him that Streamyard is a live streaming studio platform that's perfect for people looking to get into content creation and make high-quality content. Even better, with Streamyard, all you need to get started is an internet connection and a camera. You don't even need to be on time. From there, you could live stream your content directly from your browser to multiple social media platforms, including Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, and more. Best of all, you could stream to all of them at the same time. Simply put, you could increase your outreach for free. Streamyard also offers tons of different analytic tools that could help you measure the success of each one of your live streams. And knowing which social media platform is drawing the most of your viewers could help you really optimize for that. So, if you want to start creating content, StreamYard is the best place to get started without spending any money. So, check out StreamYard today using the link down below in the description. I made it, man. Guys, I made it on time. I'm so sorry, Graham. I'm late. Check out Streamyard today using the link down below in the description. It's completely free. Thank you so much, Streamyard. Thank you, Graham, for being patient. Guys, if you want us to do some sort of skit or almost anything in the next StreamYard ad read, they gave us full permission to do whatever we want. So, whatever you say down below in the description, we'll pick a few and we'll just go ahead and do it. So, uh, with that said, thank you so much. Thanks to Streamyard for being accommodating on this. Now, let's get back to the podcast. By the way, guys, before we go into that, I just want to throw this in. I know it's very abrupt, but we did something. We bought the domain iced coffee hour.comclub. You might be asking, Graham, why is it a dot club? Well, because I'll tell you. Because.com was taken. So, if you guys want to see how to get merch just like this, very, very cool merch. You want to look as cool as me, check it out with the link down below in the description. We also have subscription tiers where you can access neat things such as videos without ads, your name shown at the end of the video, and also extra episodes each month where it's just us. And you can only see that on our website. We have a VIP tier where we really only have a few people in there, but we get to hang out. The last time we did this, we all got to hang out. We got a private bowling suite here in Las Vegas. What? Oh, come on. It's a good It was a good bowl. It's good. We spent all the money that we make on that back on the event itself. So, it's just a fantastic time. Check it out with the link down below in the description. And we're running a limited time sale that's going on right now. So, if you're the first to sign up, you will get a discount. So enjoy that discount for the first month. Enjoy. And now with that said, let's get back to the episode. How did you decide what segment to go into? What type of medicine? When I was in medical school, I actually thought I was going to do surgery. And I thought that was the field for me. Especially I was like loving video games. If you see my PS5 here, and I was like, that's what surgery is going to become. There's robot surgery now. And in reality, I started going in and scrubbing into those surgeries. I did like 60 of them in my third year of medical school. I realized this isn't for me. It's not human enough in terms of interaction with the human because your patient's asleep most of the time. Um, you don't have good continuity, meaning like once you fix the issue, you don't see that person anymore. And I saw the value in family medicine where if someone comes in with an issue, a I'm playing detective. I'm trying to figure out what they need, but then at the same time is once I make an intervention and fix the problem, I still keep seeing them and get to live life with this person. I get to see the benefits of treating them. I get to see that they were able to start a family. Like I remember uh one of my first two patients on my schedule were husband and wife that were there um for similar reasons. He was here uh he was there for a sexual dysfunction and she was there for a problem with conception getting pregnant. And obviously I knew what the issue was cuz the husband is having this problem and I found it was because of a medicine he was on for his prostate size. I switched the medicine. He was able to get an erection. They were able to conceive. I delivered the baby. The baby is my patient. And that's only going to happen if you're primary care because you're able to follow the whole journey of the family. Why is surgery so far removed in terms of not following up with patient? Is that done for a reason that you could say like objective or or be less emotional about the a surgeon's is a transactional field. A person has problem A, you do treatment B, they get better. That's it. There's no need to see the surgeon after. Like if you have uh an appendicitis and you need your your appendix removed, once the surgeon takes out your appendix, maybe doesn't want followup, you don't continue seeing the surgeon. Like what would you even see them for? So it's the nature of the field being so transactional and and problem solving, which is good because a lot of people are like that. They want to solve the problem, move on, but then you kind of lose the growth of that person in throughout their livelihood. Why are some of these surgeries so expensive? Because you see in the US it's like4 million for a surgery but then you'll see it done overseas for 30 grand 40. Yeah. Overseas it's difficult to compare because now you're comparing health systems which some are government funded meaning taxpayer funded. Uh in other areas there's hybrid systems like what we have here in the states. But the the number one reason that I see it happening here is because we don't have transparency in pricing. So if you, for example, want to have a cosmetic surgery in America, you can call 10 cosmetic practices and say, "Hey, I want to get a nose job. What's the cost of a nose job?" And they will tell you their price because they don't have to negotiate with an insurance company. They that you have to pay them. So you can get fair pricing and you could choose the one that you think is the best value. But good luck calling hospitals and saying, "Hey, I need a an appendecttomy because I have an appendicitis. Which one is going to give me the best rates?" they won't be able to give you that because they have different prices for one insurance. They have a agreement with this other insurance and it's a disaster. Why is it so inefficient? How have they not figured out a better way to to do that? Why is it why do they have to charge different insurance companies different rates? Because it's hybridized so far. It's almost like a mutated system. It started off in one way, then someone had another idea to bring one approach, then someone had another approach and now it's so segmented that and and this is largely driven by lobbyists who come in and start lobbying the government to say, "Oh, we need multiple insurance carriers. We need these rules for insurance carriers." And as a result, for me, if you walk into my practice and I tell you you need uh treatment A, I can't even tell you what the cost of treatment day is because it's so dependent on variables that are outside of my control because it depends is your like for example, if a patient comes in and they tell me they fell and I write that in the chart, patient fell blah blah blah. In the note, I say, "Oh, they fell at work. They were doing X, Y, and Z." And I finish the note. I send it to their insurance carrier. Their insurance, their health insurance might deny that claim and say, "What do you mean they fell at work? You said in your note, that means they uh their health work workers compensation has to cover it, not us." Or the same thing will happen with a car accident. A patient will come to see me and they'll say, "My back hurts." But in the note, they'll say, "Oh, I had a car accident four years ago." The insurance will deny it and say, "The auto insurance is supposed to pay for this." So, they all like kick the bucket on who's supposed to make the payment. So it's a complete disaster in terms of care. Like you cannot imagine a more broken system and the fact that it still somehow works to some degree is magical. So that's what partially happened to me when I did a skin checkup. Um I had a mole that I went online for and WebMD said it was uh basil cell. So I got it I wanted to get it checked out but the wait was two months y to get in. or I just pay $250 out of pocket and I go to the person down the street. Y and that's what I did and I got in the next morning. Why is that such a difficult process to like two months to get an appointment? Oh, that was to get to the appointment just to get the recommendation. So, I had to see the primary to get this the the specialty doctor after it would be like 3 months. Yeah. A lot of times this is created by our capitalistic system where doctors that are in demand realize that working with insurance companies will yield a lower profit than working with individuals who have cash who want demand service. So they leave the insurance game and they say, "I'm only going to accept cash payments from now on." And that way they know exactly what they're getting paid. They don't have to argue with insurers. And as a result, they are more financially successful than doctors who accept insurance. And that's largely a generalization, but usually if you're accepting cash, you're doing better than most. I've heard somewhere, I don't know if this is true at all. I I've known nothing about the healthare system, but are doctors contractors for the hospital in some situations or are they like salaried employees? It's both. So, what does the contract situation look like? do they like rent the the space that they have? So sometimes there's so many different arrangements that can happen, but I'll give you like for example in ERS, it's very common that a hospital system would contract an ER employer who then has a bunch of ER doctors that work for them and then they'll just place them at certain shifts at different hospitals. So they don't even work for the hospital. They work for the ER employer who then puts them in different staffing sort of locations. And then you have private practices like my dad currently is a primary care doctor and he has a private practice. Those are getting bought up by hospital systems and uh they'll pay the provider a small amount of money or a large amount of money depending on how successful the practice is and then say okay we essentially own all of your patients. They're are members of our practice. So that if you refer patients, it should be within our system, etc., etc. And now all of these smaller doctors that used to run their own sort of shops, if you will, are now part of a great health system, like a bigger health system. So there's less and less individualized practices. So what do you think is one of the biggest issues that or what one of the things that creates these issues? Is it is it the amount of doctors that we have? Is it the fact that they incur so much debt going through college that it kind of deters people and then they have to make a bunch of money in order to pay it off? That's most definitely an issue. Med school is crazy expensive to the tune of if you're talking med school and college, it's $600,000 of loans, not living expenses excluded. That's just for the education component. Then obviously uh the idea of why doctors are selling their practices is because of administrative burden. the idea there's like 10 different insurance companies that have 10 different rules. So when a patient comes into my practice, I'll you know fill out a note and then I have to bill that note to the insurance company. But let's say I write a code for their condition that let's say doesn't fit the test requirement that they have to pay for that blood test. The bill will go to the patient. The patient say what the heck why is this not being covered? And it's because the insurer didn't like the code that I put. So this creates this huge administrative burden on doctors where we're like screw this. We don't want to practice this way. We want the hospital systems to take care of it. But then when hospital systems take care of it, it doesn't it loses that personal touch that you have with your doctor because now essentially you're a contractor being contracted to see a patient every 15 minutes as opposed to create inform. How difficult is it to collect payments? Because you mentioned one insurance company kicking it to another and I bet the car place is like no it's them. And then The cost of healthcare in America has ballooned over the last 20 30 years and it's not because doctors cost more to the system. In fact, doctors like cost of the system has stayed pretty stable or has gone up slightly with the cost of inflation. But the idea of health care has skyrocketed because for every doctor you need like 10 to 15 administrators. You need a person to argue with insurance company. You need a person to uh make sure the billing is right from the doctor's side. You need someone doing prior authorizations to argue for your patients to get certain tests done. It's it's literally a disaster. Is there a solution to this? I mean, it's no, there's not. Well, some people will say universal healthcare is the solution. Um, I think it could be a potential solution, but there's no one-sizefits-all answer because some people will say, well, universal healthcare isn't free healthcare. It's still paid by somebody. It's paid by us, the taxpayers. So, some people will argue against that. And if we're being honest, whatever the government does usually isn't the most effective or efficient way of doing things. So you could easily see more troubles arise in that scenario as well. If you were in control of the system, no idea. What you you would have no idea videos. I don't I react to Tik Tok videos. What I I when I was growing up, I remember my parents and a lot of people, we never had to worry about certain things because I remember we had a co-ay, right? Long or gone are like the ages of the majority of people having co-pays and now when I do insurance, we have deductibles. Why has insurance switched from this model of, you know, having people pay a predictable price when they go to the doctor to basically now I have insurance in case I get into a crazy accident and my bills I can't afford? Sure. Um, that's a great question and it's a very simple answer. Insurance costs have gone up, but they wanted to make it seem like they didn't. So the insurers are really good at hiding the costs from you of what your care actually costs. So what they do is let's say 10 years ago you would pay $1,000 a month for your health insurance, but at that time you had some co-pays which were small and no real deductibles. Now you'll still pay $1,000 a month for your insurance, but now the first $5,000 you have to pay which is your deductible. So the cost is tremendously higher but when you're making your monthly payments you don't even realize that it's higher. So insurers instead of making less money because they're not efficient at handling our health care system, they just push the cost burden back onto the the consumer. Is there a country that you've seen that's done the health care system in a way that you like or that's maybe efficient or is it just I'm not an expert. Um, you know, I have friends that work in the Canadian health care system and they brought up issues that they have with their own system. I've heard people in the UK in Canada is a long time, like six I've heard waits are a long time, but then they don't have to worry about going to the emergency room because of fees or the ambulance costs being out of control. So, there's pros and cons, and some people might like one system better than the other. I think there's a lot of intricacies that you would miss out on unless you practice in those or you're an expert in those countries. I kind of wish there were a flat tax, like an extra 1% tax. It's a 1% healthcare tax across the board. Everyone pays 1%. This is going to play well as a politician. Do not go into politics. You just lost your campaign. Really? Is that bad? Just an extra 1% of tax. But but healthcare is is free. Is that bad? I don't know. I don't I don't know. See, I wish somebody would have thought about that earlier. It's easy. It's 1%. I wonder if like that math like adds up, you know? I got to think about it. I mean, probably not. But I don't know. I have a great finance related question. Medicare is 2.4%, right? Or something like that. People don't want their tax. Good luck asking people to raise their taxes and winning on that. Let me let me run by this quick Tik Tok life hack that I ran across. Meme reacting doctor. So, I've heard people online because you were talking about how hard it is to collect. I I heard people online saying, "Oh, if you have medical debt, then like write them a letter because HIPPA doesn't allow doctors to disclose what medical information or whatever." And then basically it's it's when the debt goes to to like a debt collection company. But are how how are people collecting? Is that true? You mean like how do they collect debt? Um, yeah. So, basically there's multiple ways they do go to debt collection agencies. Some hospital systems have gotten in trouble for suing families in court over unpaid fees. That's been like an issue in the news. Um, and the the one piece of maybe you could call this a Tik Tok life hack advice is if you feel like your fee is high or unfair or you don't have the funds to pay it, always argue every bill. Every bill. The reason why is a lot of times it's an error on coding. Like I didn't write the code that would get your test covered as a doctor because I have no idea. So that someone in administration can change the code and get it covered. That's number one. Number two, when health insurers charge you a fee. Let's say you're paying out of pocket for a condition like you have no insurance and you go to the emergency room and the hospital charges 100 I'm making this up. $100 for an emergency appendix removal. They have to charge you as a cash user the same amount by law in order to charge it to the health insurance company. But they know the health insurance company why they're charging them 100 because they'll only pay them 60. That's the deal that they have with the health insurance. So when you get the bill for 100 and you argue, they'll right away lower it to 60. They just can't do that by law, but they can do it if you claim financial hardship. Wow. I think you just saved a lot of people in need of I mean I I say that quite often like always argue your bills because a lot of them are mistakes and if they're not mistakes, there's financial support programs. Like my hospital system that I work for is a nonprofit and we have a charity care system in place for those who uh fall below the poverty line or near the poverty line and like I see patients all day long that are either seeing me completely for free are getting scans done completely for free getting surgeries for free getting scheduled with specialists for free. So like there are systems in place it just a lot of people aren't aware of those systems so they go underutilized. When did you start doing YouTube videos? What prompted that? Because it seems like two totally different. Yeah, it's a different world and you don't see at least five years ago you didn't see doctors on social media. When I was uh a resident, I had a viral moment of fame for superficial reasons. It was like Buzzfeed wrote an article like check out this doctor and his husky. And it was nothing about my medical accomplishments, not that I was the youngest doctor in my hospital and I did research. It was like 2015. Okay. And in that moment, I had to be like, "Okay, do I like accept this? Do I go on the TV shows and play the hot doctor thing or do I That was what it was." That was Yeah. It was like, "Check out this hot doctor and his husband." No way. That was the name of the article. Yeah. Wow. That's such good publicity. That's funny. It was the time where a lot of people were going viral for their looks. Like there was the the Target uh the weather person. Like there was a lot of people going viral. How old were you? I was 2015 was 25. 25. How did they find you? Well, I had an Instagram presence, but it was only like 10,000 20,000. How did you already have a lot? Um, I just had like a daily blog of being a medical student and then a resid. Yeah. Just 10 20,000 people. But that wasn't a lot like compared to what came after the viral moment. That's awesome. But I was doing Instagram for a while. Okay. Like from 2012, I was consistently posting and I was really passionate about How were you gaining followers back then? Was it just the recommended feeds that people would find? Yeah, at that time it was easier to grow. You would like a lot of pictures and that would pop up for people. So like strategic about it or was it just fun? I was, but I was more strategic about it for again superficial reasons. Just being like a young person being like, "Oh, I can get into cool events and clubs by having 10,000 followers." Yeah. So, being a broke medical student, that was a cool way of kind of setting yourself apart. So, how did BuzzFeed reach out to you? They didn't. They just wrote their thing. Then people just started messaging me like, "Dude, you're on BuzzFeed." They linked your Instagram in the article. The whole article was my Instagram. It's like pictures of my Instagram. And that was BuzzFeed at its prime. Prime. So Buzzfeed wrote it. Trending number one on BuzzFeed. Every I remember that story by the way. You remember? I remember that story. Yeah. Yeah. like from that literally that next week, Ellen Degenerous is calling. Steve Harvey's call. Everyone's arguing to have you on their show cuz you're like the it thing and I didn't know what to do. So, I asked for some time and then I said, "You know what? I'll do Ellen Degenerous show." She was the number one at the time. So, I went on to do the show. I'm about to do it. The plan was it was her, she only shoots out of LA, but they were shooting a Labor Day episode out of New York, so it was perfect. I'm in New York. I'm like, I'm going to do this show. day before they cancel on me and they say, "Hey, Hillary Clinton is announcing her run for presidency." And the other guests are Jimmy Kimmel and Pink. We're now bumping them. We're bumping you. So, I got bumped off Ellen Degenerous. I'm like, "No problem. I'll call Steve Harvey back or all these other shows and do them because they wouldn't allow you to do both." Yeah. So, I would I called and they're like, "Oh, no. You're last week's news. We don't care about you anymore." No, that's it. So, that's it. You're done. You're old news now. I was kind of thinking you have to hop on those quick. You have to That's it. like they forget about you. Yeah. Right. So like two weeks later it was gone. It was forgotten from the major shows and then I started doing like regular news getting some opportunities and I would do the hot doctor thing but under the the invite would be because I'm a hot doctor or that was like their title. But then I would talk about primary care or prevention or things that I was passionate about and just use the hot doctor thing as the hook to get the invite. And then it kind of dried up because the hot doctor thing fell off. And they were like well you're a young doctor. What advice do you have? We have doctors that are been practicing in Ivy League for 30 years. Why would we want you on our network? So I said, "Cool. I'll start a YouTube channel." I started a YouTube channel. All from the Buzzfeed article that was written that prompted it. Yep. Two years after that, I started YouTube. I wanted to do it earlier, but I had no skills editing or doing any of this stuff. And residencies, 80 to 100 hours a week. Yeah. How did you find the time to balance that? And was there ever any issue with the hospital or the doctor, the place you were working having a channel talking about? Well, I I started YouTube specifically at the tail end of my residency, so that wasn't a problem, but Instagram was certainly scary to them. They didn't know what to make of that. I mean, again, they're in a nonprofit system, and they're like, "What is this?" And all these news agencies are calling. They're worried I'm going to do something wrong. Show patient information. Again, they don't know what I'm posting. So, it was all new to them. And it felt very superficial because it was selfie driven on Instagram. But then once YouTube came around and they saw what I was doing with YouTube, putting out evidence-based info, countering misinformation, getting young folks interested about their health, they suddenly changed their tune and were like, "Wow, we love this. Can we get you involved with our hospital more? They hired me after residency to continue working there and now we have a great working relationship." How do you balance the information with with making sure everything you say is factually accurate? In what sense? in the sense of like ever giving medical advice or maybe something that could be deemed as like you shouldn't be saying that online as a doctor. Yeah. Yeah. So, there's a very important distinction to be drawn when you're talking about general medical information versus individual, I'm giving you advice. Okay. So, even if we do a responding to comments video and someone asks a question about their diagnosis, I won't answer them. I'll say when I see a patient with this diagnosis, here's what comes to mind. and I kind of give them what's in my mind as opposed to treating them. So, it's always with the idea that we're talking in generalities, we're doing general education, not me becoming your doctor because that is what is unethical and not right and not helpful to anybody because I can't give advice off of a comment. Like there's no way I can conceptualize everything that's going on in their life, which you need in order to make a diagnosis, including a physical exam. And I found it interesting when when we were doing your podcast, you made it very clear. I'm not your doctor. Is you do you have to reiterate that all the time? Really? Yeah. To me, it means common sense. Like, yeah, I know. I know you're not doctor, but for sure. I I have to reiterate it. Um I do it less re reiteration on my channel because I've gotten better at answering the question where it's clear that I'm not answering it for you. Now, what happens? Is there a liability if you didn't say that? If I ask you, hey, what do you think of this? you forgot that part and you just went into well that is blah blah blah blah. Yeah. Like if a patient's like uh asks a question, not a patient, if a someone on comments a thing on YouTube and says Dr. Mike like why is my ankle always hurt after I go to the gym? And I take that comment I say your ankle hurts when you go to the gym because you sprained your ankle and as a result you have a weak ligament. And I make this whole diagnosis and then they don't seek care and it turns out that they have a cancer in their ankle. They can sue me. Got it. Because I crossed the line and I gave them medical advice as a physician. What was the main takeaway from of Graham's body? Like what was the what was the Oh, yeah. This would be interesting. The main takeaway of your body. No, because he went on your podcast and I'm guessing you assessed his body, right? I did not. What are you implying here? I'm not implying anything. You just had flash. His body is fantastic. What? Okay. Well, but you you examined him. I should say I did not even went on in that room. It's called It was a while. It was longer than I thought it would be. It's called the checkup. Like the check-in, not like an actual checkup. Okay. So, it was a checkup. So, you examined his body on camera? Yes. I did not examine. But what was like what was something that you guys went over? Um his fitness journey from 2020 to 2021. Um because Graham said he didn't pay attention to his health as much as he should have because the cost dynamics of driving to the gym outweighed the savings potential. I I'm guessing based off the way you said that that I can understand your take on that. I would probably agree with you. Pencil out. Understood. Okay. Well, the reason is because I think that even by Graham's logic, that was a bad decision because his logic is about getting the most ROI, right? And him going to the gym was too expensive for the time and how much he was earning at the time per hour. But he was miscalculating that because he wasn't factoring in the ROI from decreasing the likelihood of future disease by going to and also the energy that you get when you are in good shape. Exactly. Yeah. Well, I mentioned that I was feeling tired, not as like lethargic a little bit, a little more down. It's harder to concentrate. Got it. But overall, how did I how how do I stack up? Like you're not my doctor, but like generally you really think he's going to say something mean right now? I mean, what are you looking for? Just Well, Jack wanted like he wants honesty. He wants me to look at your body and I haven't done that. You don't have to examine his body if you don't want to cough. Yeah. No. Oh man. No. There was no medical exam done. And he didn't show me the growth that you guys were talking about. God. Yeah. That growth is insane. By the way, someone's going to clip this up. It's going to sound so wrong. Got to Oh, good. That'll go viral. What I kind of want to discuss a little bit more is your time in residency cuz to me that's like bewildering the fact that you were working 80 to 100 hours a week. Meanwhile, like I I assume like you were incurring incredible amounts of debt. Like how was that financially? How much debt did you end up having? And then the job right out of college, like how much is it? Yeah. So I I'll give you sort of the norms and then I'll give you what happened to me. So generally speaking, people come out of debt come out of medical school with a debt of around $500,000. um if they took loans for both college and medical school. Uh my debt was around 300,000 because college was uh free. I had a pretty strong scholarship. So I just had to pay for like living expenses. Once you come out, you start working in residency which is around 45 to 60,000 a year depending on which specialty, which hospital. But if you calculate per hour, you make $8 an hour. Why is it so little? Because technically you're also gaining a lot of experience oversight essentially like if you're seeing a patient as a resident, you're also being overseen by a superior like a senior doctor who's also getting paid to see that patient. So the hospital is essentially paying both of you and they can't afford to pay both of you a senior doctor salary. And that's why a lot of these residency programs are government funded spots and that's why we're trying to increase spots all the time. I mean, that's something I've actually done advocacy work for before to increase more residency spots. And then once you come out, depending on your specialty, there's a lot of variability in how much you can earn. Um, you know, being a a primary care doctor, the earning is somewhere in the 200 to 300,000 per year range. If you're And that's after residency. Again, that's already like 10 years of education. Do you go into that right after graduating or is you do? Okay. Yeah. After graduating, residency. Yes. Correct. Not medical school. So when did you how old were you when you graduated residency? 27. So I was really young cuz the average age going into medical school was 26. I was 20. And that's how many you four years or medical school is four years. So the average age of finishing my medical school class was 30 and I was 24. Did you graduate college very fast? I did one of those seven-year combined programs and I had a late birthday. So it was like a lot of combined factors there. So, I came out and I was I just started my YouTube channel and I started working for my hospital part-time, balancing that and the YouTube world. And initially, YouTube wasn't super successful. And that first year was rough trying to figure out how to make ends meet. You'd probably hate me because I saved zero dollars. Um, and I did it with the intention of growth mindset that I wasn't saving because the idea was that the following year I would earn so much more. And that was true. And each year over the last 5 years of having the YouTube channel, our revenue has increased 100% each year, year to year. Really? Yeah. What do you attribute that to? I think good sort of ethical standards when it comes to the YouTube channel. As a doctor, the ads you do are very different. They carry a different weight than if you're just a traditional influencer because you're an expert in the field. You have um a medical board behind you. So, there are certain standards you have to follow, not just FTC guidelines, but also the medical board guidelines of disclosing relationships. And I would never be the doctor that's recommending the miracle cure all supplements that are out there. Whereas if I were to do that, my god, I would be, you know, crossed the hundred million mark yearly every year. That that money is out there to be made supplement world. And I denounce that in supplements. I do that at my expense, right? Can you break that? What does that involve? The supplement world. Yeah. Like how does that work? Well, the way that supplements are regulated in this country is they're not. So, if I wanted to in this room right here, start a supplement line called Dr. Mike's Run Faster, Stronger, Better Line of Supplements, I can pour the whatever the ingredients are here, stick on the label right here, and sell it on my website, and there's no rules that I'm breaking. And because of that, you could make a ton of money because I could sell those at 100 bucks a pop monthly. people when there's a subs subscription model already more revenue and as a result with the following that I have and I could say look I'm in great shape because of this again another claim so there's a lot of money to be had why is there not regulation is it because the ingredients are not harmful to people or is it just claims aren't verifi like what's no so the FDA which is our regulatory agency for pharmaceuticals has made a stance mostly due to lobbyists for the supplement industry country to say that they cannot regulate supplements because there are not drugs. But they can regulate food, right? Um in certain ways, yes. But they say that they're a food supplement. So they fall outside of their jurisdiction. And you say the main reason for that is just lobbying. Correct. Sounds like And also people who love their supplements also want that lobbying. There's people who swear by their supplements. And I'm not saying all supplements are bad because there are times where you need to take supplements. But people who love their supplements and swear by them and make them their identity essentially say that we don't want the FDA involved in this because it's going to make the supplements more expensive and harder to access. Would you recommend the average person to be taking casual supplements or like magnesium or like zinc or daily like B12? It's a loaded question because it really depends on why you're taking them, who you are, what your goals are, and for how long you plan to be taking them. Because just on the outset, I have two major problems with the supplement industry. Uh three, one is the lack of regulation. there there will only be regulation on a supplement is if there have been side effects or negative things associated like if there are deaths they'll start investigating supplements and they'll pull them off shelves but that's a little bit too late. The second is when consumer reports or consumer labs would go and test the things on the shelves and compare it to what's on the nutrition list, the ingredients uh like the nutrition facts, it would not match up like 70% of the time. Really? Yeah. So what you're buying you're not even really getting in most cases. And then the final thing is when they would look at certain supplements like protein powders, there's many others, they would find like heavy metal toxicity in them, like things that are not supposed to be in those things because they're not carefully monitored. My big big problem is that these supplement companies prey on what our insecurities are. that we want to be skinnier, we want to be stronger, we want to have better sex, whatever it is. They prey on our insecurities. They make false promises sometimes in very shady ways where they can get away without getting in trouble with the FDA. Because if you say this supplement cures cancer, you will get in trouble. But if you say this supplement has ingredient X and ingredient X is crucially important in fighting cancer, now you're just saying that that ingredient is good in fighting cancer, not the product. So it kind of creates some gray zone that they're allowed to market it that way. I tried one of those focus supplements. Actually, did you take one with me, Jack? You did. Did I? Yeah, I think you did. and um took it and uh we looked afterwards and realized the reason they market for focus is because it has a whole bunch of caffeine which is a lot of like there was a popular supplement weight loss supplement back in the day that got in a lot of trouble because it had a fedra in it and as a result people started having liver toxicity serious problems people lost their lives as a result so it was pulled off the market and now they've reformulated and brought it back to the market because it was so popular I don't even want to say it on the name of it but it's like incredible that the supplement industry kind of stays under the radar under the guise of natural and somehow in people's minds the word natural means safe and I have to constantly remind my patients arsenic cyanide natural but also poisonous and anything in medicine is the the poison comes from the dose and there's no such thing as natural means all safe supplements are not better than medications We as doctors don't automatically reach for medications. If there's a supplement that's been proven to work, we'd happily use that. It's they've created a really strong like us versus them tribalism mentality that you have to either be in the supplement camp or in the traditional medicine camp. And it doesn't have to be that dichotomy. We were having an interesting conversation before we actually started recording that was about doctors and hypochondrics because I know Graham is a bit of a hypochondric himself. He couldn't tell. Really? You didn't you didn't come off that quite often. I think I think it's pretty obvious when I was like I had the mole and I went on WebMD and instantly everyone does that. I guess so. But I went to the worst. I was like convinced. Graham is he's convinced that the worst stuff is happening around him at all times. I prepared for the worst at all times. That's a good strategy. Yeah. Um, but yeah, I was wondering going through med school, seeing all these people in all these different situations and like constantly being like exposed to, I don't know, people like in serious degrees. Does that make you worried like when you see a mole on yourself or when you, you know what I mean, your hairline come back, you're like, "Oh, no, this is it." So, I think when you're in med school because you lack the experience, but you have some book knowledge, it is full hypochondric mode where you think you have everything. Like you're reading this condition and you're like about brain cancer and you're like I had the headache yesterday. That means like this is what I have. I have brain cancer cuz I had headache two days in a row. You know what? You didn't sleep two days in a row cuz you were studying and drinking caffeine like crazy. So then once you become a doctor and you've been practicing long enough, you end up flipping and being like brushing everything off and thinking that it's nothing and you actually become a really bad patient as a result. So, um, it's very classic for doctors who are parents and their child comes to them with some kind of ache or pain, they'll just make you fine, which is what my dad did to me. That's interesting. And you preferred that? Um, maybe not as a kid cuz I was like, I just feel constantly written off. But I think in medicine you have to understand that you can't just go off of symptoms because like you saw in WebMD having a certain mole or having a symptom like a headache could easily be associated with a tumor if you look at WebMD because it's true a symptom of a tumor is headache but not every headache leads to a tumor. So how do you make the decision of when it is a tumor? You let the doctors who have the experience and the knowledge to sort of guide that uh that needle with you. And what percentage of symptoms do you think are mental versus actual physical symptoms? Cuz I have a housemate and every time he starts feeling himself getting sick a little bit, what he'll do is he'll like take a shot of whiskey like, "All right, I'm gonna go for a run." and he'll like he is under the belief that if he feels sick 80% of the time it's mental and if you just put yourself at a positive like you know you become optimistic you're like I'm going to get through this I don't feel anything and just block it out after a day it goes away. So, first of all, if you're not feeling well and you're taking a shot and you're going for a run, that's not good medical advice. Like, you shouldn't Okay, I have to put that on the Okay. Um, the second is your mindset has a huge sort of outcome as to how well you perform in terms of healing. So, if you look at those who have a positive mindset, who are optimistic, just from that we've seen faster rates of recovery. um better rates of recovery with certain conditions. So mindset absolutely plays a role. At the same time, we have to be very careful and not say that these symptoms are in your head because the symptoms are real. The pain that you're experiencing is real. The question is, is it coming from a mental source or is it a physical source that's anatomical in nature? So, for example, if I have knee pain, but I only have knee pain when I'm annoyed, when I'm home, and I'm not happy with my living situation, that symptom is real. That's a real symptom. But is the cause something wrong with my knee or is it because my perception of the pain when I'm unhappy turns up the feeling of the pain, the ache that's in the knee? So, it's really our perception that changes of our symptoms, but the symptoms are really there. So, we want to be careful to not write those things off. Interesting. Did you see that Joe Rogan episode that he released recently? You probably saw it, the Sam and Kobe one, where they were talking about back pain. And in older people, I think Joe threw out some statistic that was wild for me to hear, but I think it was like 50% or some crazy high number of people that experience back pain at an older age, it's actually just all in their head. Again, it's not in their head. the the the cause could be coming from their mind. Meaning that they have pains. First of all, as a human that has lived as long as we're living these days, you're going to have aches and pains. But now, the way that our mind works is we have at our control, unbeknownst to us, a volume for the pain. And when we're in a bad mental state, we turn the volume on our pain higher. And when we're in a good mood and things are going great, we turn that pain lower. So if you're in a really bad situation mentally and you're suffering with anxiety, depression, you're really upset about a situation in your life, you've you're experiencing trauma mentally, that pain's going to feel worse. The pain is real, but your perception of it is higher. And then by experiencing the pain and not exiting that constant reinforcing cycle of the pain and you telling yourself, okay, anatomically there's nothing wrong. I'm doing everything I need to do. Just doing that can snap you out of that cycle where your negative emotions keep feeding the pain. What do you think about David Gogggins and his ability to push through the pain? And it seems like for him it's just all mental, right? like he could get a I think his like famous thing was he was running a some crazy 100 mile thing and he like fractured his shins or something and he like kept pushing through that. I don't think that's applicable to 99.9% of the population. Yeah, his thing was running like 30 miles a day. Yeah, there was some story where he was literally like fractured his legs while he was running and he just kept going. Are there good takeaways from some of the things he does? Probably. I don't even know the exact details of what he recommends, but we have to remember that outliers in health are usually not good in both directions. Meaning that never exercising is not good for your body. Always exercising and breaking your body down to the point you're breaking your shins is also not good for the body. We see this in people who overtrain for ultramarathons. They have abnormalities in their heart rhythm like their uh arhythmias start forming. So like it's a balance. The human body is all based on a balance. It's all homeostasis, which is like the body trying to maintain itself in a balance. And anytime you go too far to the extreme, it's not ideal. And you know where this shows itself really cool in a really practical way financially for you guys, it's obvious why for someone who doesn't have money, who's of low socioeconomic status, why they don't get good health care, right? They can't afford it. They don't have access to good doctors. They may not go to the ER because they're worried about costs, right? So, they get worse health care. But then it might surprise you to know that people on the higher end of the spectrum who are very wealthy also get crap medical care. Is that surprising? Do you know why? Because they think they can buy health. So, they go and they say, "Scan my body, put me in executive health program. Make sure there's nothing wrong with me." And therefore, they get CAT scans that they don't need. Now, they're radiating their bodies. They're taking these supplements that have heavy metal poisoning in them and aren't proven to do anything and as a result they're harming their health and they go to their doctor and their doctor is so submissive to them because they're paying them so much money that they say, "Doctor, I need an antibiotic." When they have a virus and the doctor should know that they don't need an antibiotic, it's a viral infection, not a bacterial one. And a doctor because of capitalistic forces and wanting to please their patient gives them what they want, but it's not good for their health. So the really wealthy and the really poor both get bad medical care for very different reasons. Wow. See, I I'm so nervous now because now I feel like I'm going to wonder so if if my mentality or my perspective on something amplifies the actual like the the the issue at hand. It's like how much of it is in my head? And if I change my mind and I and I act as though everything's going to be okay and I like put that optimistic positive attitude on and I I could be ignoring something but it does seemingly go away or vice versa. It's like, you know what I mean? But you don't have to do the dichotomy. It's not you either are positive and get no care or are negative and get all the care. It's those are those are that's a false choice that you're making. You could be very positive and still seek care. It would just be hard to be able to detect when it's, you know what I mean? But it won't be you detecting it. Don't leave it up to yourself. Like if you're experiencing some kind of symptom that is causing you to even wonder if you should get it checked out, be positive, but then go see the doctor and tell the doctor everything that you're experiencing. Yeah, that sounds like a pretty good answer. So, you're doing both. Yeah, I have a I have a really interesting question. How come if you know I trip over this table and I I hurt my leg and I break my bone, I I can get treatment regardless of my ability to pay, right? or most places in the US. Um, why doesn't that same principle really apply to dental care? Like I could have a rotting tooth that hurts so badly and dental care for some reason it has like a separate insurance and and that the work is not really performed unless you could pay for it. Yeah. Is there a good reason? I I don't know why it's like that. It's really bad. Um, and there is a rule that like I'm assuming you have insurance because if you let's say get into a car accident and you don't have insurance, the hospital still has to stabilize you. That's a rule. I think it's called EMTLA or something. It's like a federal rule that the hospital has to make sure you stay alive because imagine they're waiting to see if you have insurance before saving your life and all of a sudden you lose. So they're not allowed to make a decision on whether or not to save your life based on insurance status. But um going to see a primary doctor, they might not see you if you don't have insurance and you're not willing able to pay. So it's different based on emergent or non-emergent. And dental care is a lot like mental health care. Why is it so difficult to get in to see a psychologist or a psychiatrist in comparison to seeing a cardiologist when really if we invest more in our mental health care system, we get better outcomes in our cardiac care because as we were just talking about your mindset impacts your physical symptoms like not just your knee pain, but it also impacts your blood pressure. If you have a very high blood pressure, your heart has to pump against that. As a result, if it's doing that long enough, it develops heart failure. And that could come as a result of a mental health situation. So investing in our mental health would yield tremendous returns. But I'll tell you why insurers don't do that because they constantly swap who they're covering. So as a result, usually one insurer will cover a person for a shorter period of time, not their entire life. You'll have multiple insurance plans throughout your life. But if we decrease that number and one insurer covered someone throughout their whole life, then they might see the benefit of investing in preventive health, mental health, dental health, because then you'll have less problems. But because they'll see you only for these three years, they're trying to maximize their earnings and decrease their spending. So it's messed up. I never thought of that before. Yeah. What? That's mind-blowing to me. I'm like, you're you're blowing my mind. I I'm just asking you I'm just asking you all the medical questions. I was These are all good questions. What about chiropractors? Because there's people who are like, "Oh, I got to go to the chiropractor." And then there's the opposite who are like, "That's a scam." Now, what how does traditional medicine view chiropractors? Traditional medicine has a probably a negative skewed view of it um because there's less rigorous randomized controlled studies which is like kind of the gold standard that we use to make our decisions um based on like what we believe is to be proven. I think that there are good chiropractors and there are problematic ones who make false promises and start practicing outside of their scope. But I also have patients who get tremendous relief from it. It kind of falls into that gray zone. It depends um of what's happening because a lot of what is taught in chiropractic medicine may not vibe with traditional medicine. But in the end, if you're treating uh the body like the muscles, the fascia, like true physical conditions, and you're not making false promises on those, you can help patients a lot. But I do see a lot of BS in that space. But the to be fair, I see a lot of BS in the regular doctor space as well with doctors practice uh promising miracle cures with their supplements and stuff. So it's like it just it really depends is the is the bottom line when it comes to it. But I will say that all the cracking videos on social media probably go too far with what they're promising. And when I say too far, I mean probably a lot of the benefit that people are getting from those are more placebo benefit. meaning that there's a person who's authoritative person telling them that this will help their situation and if you have that and nothing else happens 30% of the time it'll get better. It's like that joke from anchor man like 30% of the time it'll work 100% of the time. I feel like that's still good though, right? Because it still does alleviate to some capacity if it is placebo net positive. It could be good as long as it's not discouraging you from seeking something that's truly going to help your situation. one um or B if it's not causing you harm and there have been instances of some chiropractors doing things and again doctors as well that can cause harm. So some of the manipulations gone wrong things like that. So yeah it's tough like you you want to be really responsible when you say oh placebo is good because it's actually causing net positive. Well is it coming at the cost of something and is there also something negative happening as a result? Isn't it true that you can get your like back kind of kinkedked out and like does does is there a thing of just like aligning your your backbones, your spine? So alignment is probably overstated and overpromised. I'm also happen to be a DO like a doctor of osteopathic medicine. So I also do some of the hands-on manipulations. And what I want to make very clear about is it's not a magical cure for anything. The idea of osteopathic medicine comes from the idea that the body heals itself and we are really just like accessories to help it heal and optimize it healing. And we make use of the body's own natural mechanisms. Like for example, um if you uh activate your bicep and you let it win, the body is actually sending two signals. One to the bicep to flex and simultaneously one to the tricep to relax. Because you will not be able to flex if your tricep gets activated in the same moment. So you get an activating signal and an inhibitory. Everyone who's watching is doing this right now. Exactly. Yeah. So you get activating signal here and an inhibitory signal to your tricep. So if you think about that, let's say you have a spasm in your tricep. You can activate the bicep. have the person do some exercises that can help reduce the spasm in the tricep because we're using the body's own reflexes. And there's all sorts of things that we can do from myofascial techniques, um, ribb raising techniques, like for example, in patients that have asthma, if they're going into a full-blown asthma attack, their work of breathing is going up because they have to work really hard to breathe against a closed airway. That's what happens. It becomes inflamed and closed and tight. That's why you get wheezing, that the whistling sound. So you have to work really hard to breathe and the danger in asthmatic patients uh why they get intubated is because they start tiring out from breathing so hard and as a result if they tire out too quickly before the asthma attack resolves. They actually have a buildup and trapping of carbon dioxide and it can be deadly. So we intubate those patients and we allow the asthma attack to recover while we help control the removal of carbon dioxide for them through the breathing machine. But now as an osteopathic physician, there are things that I can work on on the ribs, the muscles surrounding the ribs, the diaphragm to help reduce some of the work of that breathing. Because if they have a spasm in their rib muscles or in their diaphragm, I can help treat it with some very basic techniques to reduce that labored work of breathing to potentially buy them time where maybe they don't need to get intubated. And that's kind of how osteopathic medicine works. Probably get asked this all the time, but what about cracking your back? Uh you cracking it yourself? Yeah, probably not the end of the world. Like there's research that people used to say like a a popular myth that cracking your knuckles leads to arthritis. That's been disproven. Uh we don't see that happening. Uh the only small thing that we've seen is if you consistently crack your knuckles, you may have lower grip strength. So it's a very minor thing. Small uh small payoff for the uh the satisfaction. And again, that's like cracking it all the time and not doing exercises like right. I do feel I do feel like loosened up like after I crack my fingers, you know, they feel more Is that a placebo or is there actually any sort of research about like I crack my back, it feels better. I feel more limber. It's first of all, every time you're cracking your back, you're taking it through the full range of motion. So, you're essentially already opening it up by doing that. And when I say opening it up, what I'm saying is by creating movement and activating those muscles, you're bringing circulation. When you bring circulation, muscles heal better, they move better, you're taking them through the full range of motion. In fact, that's why they crack cuz you're putting them to their end range of motion. So, you're kind of stretching that joint space. You're popping that air bubble. You're creating that that noise. So, yeah, like yeah, stretching is good. And when you stretch, sometimes you hear a popping sound. So, that's what people hear, but it's really the stretching and the movement that's making you feel good, not the actual pop. Cuz sometimes we do adjustments in osteopathic medicine where often times you hear a pop, but what we're trying to achieve is not the pop. the pop just happens, but we're trying to take people through their full range of motion. What are some health tips or hacks that you'd recommend just to the average person? Because I was going into this and I was going to ask like specifically with supplements if there are certain ones that you would take, but it sounds like that's probably not the case, but like stretching, flossing, like random stuff that people probably like pass uh pass on on the average day, but they probably should do. Well, I mean, the reality of health is not only avoiding the really bad habits that we know are proven to shorten and hurt the quality of your life, like smoking, like excess alcohol consumption, but also doing things that we know are proven to be good. And what's proven to be good? Exercise in moderate amounts. You don't have to do a lot. 150 minutes a week, moderate intensity exercise, not a lot if you're thinking about how many hours are in a week. Um, making sure you get seven to n hours of sleep. That's probably the most important one and that the people skimp out on the most. Keeping social connections alive. Um, which for us may not be as hard because we're still surrounded by people our age. But once folks get older, those social connections tend to dwindle. And that's where you have higher risks for Alzheimer's, early dementia because of the lack of social connections. Um and then uh eating a wide uh widely varied plant rich diet. You don't have to eat vegan to be healthy. You can be vegan and be healthy, but you don't have to be. You could still eat a lot of plants, meaning fruits, vegetables, and very important. Wow. Okay. Yeah, you're not eating because the reason vegetables the reason why we I say to eat those is because all those things where they claim about supplements like they say vitamin C is so important and if you don't have like if you don't take our supplement your immune system is going to suffer. This is where they lie and I'll show you how they lie. So vitamin C is crucial to your immune system. Absolutely true. In fact, if I cut out all vitamin C out of your diet, eventually your gums will start bleeding. You'll develop something known as scurvy, which is something pirates used to have. your immune system would be shot. Very true. Eating the diet that most people that live the way you live, you'll have plenty of vitamin C and you'll never get to that deficiency. But what these supplement companies promise to you is by giving you more, you'll somehow get a bigger benefit. That's not true. Once you meet the minimum requirement of what you need, that's it. Your body doesn't need anymore. It's like delivering more supplies to a construction zone and hoping they'd finish the process sooner because you delivered them more supplies. Does that help? No. You still got to build the actual building. So, more supplies, more vitamin C does not perform better than getting just what you need, which is what you're getting. I feel like what I've noticed just in my own life and some people that I'm close to, it's like the the common theme is that they don't sleep enough or they sleep in like weird hours. I'm guessing it probably is very important to go to sleep at the same time. And then also just not drinking enough water. Yeah. Hydration. So that's kind of one of those points that's being touted right now in like a sexy way where they're like, "Make sure you buy this app on your phone to remind you to drink water." If if you're thirsty, you'll drink water. That's kind of the norm. I feel like I get so caught up where, like I said, all I'll have all day is two cups of coffee. Graham does not drink very much water. Like we'll literally go out to sushi water. This is a weird question. Is your urine really dark? Uh, not usually. It's red. Is that all right? Purple. Is that normal? Um, but generally speaking, if like you're h again, remember you're getting it also from fruits and foods that you're eating. So like there's other ways that you're hydrating that you may not notice. And when you're drinking a big coffee, you're also consuming a lot of water in that coffee. Um, but I will say just it's it's overhyped because humans have survived so long with water being generally unavailable to them by knowing when they get thirsty to drink that I'm not worried that most people are going to be really harming their health by not drinking. But now I see people like they're thirsty and they pop open a Coca-Cola. Well, that's and then they is it healthy or is it not? Okay. Healthy for what? Like is it a fine way to not hydrate yourself but like is it like unhealthy to consume? Here's a good example. So I recently uh was okay I guess I'm still on fallen off this but weight loss journey. Lots of people are dealing with this right. Okay. I was a soda drinker and I replaced Coke with Coke Zero. Um so maybe we can kind of start there. So some people are like oh don't drink Coke Zero. It's like worse for you. And in my head, I'm like, well, first of all, I don't know what's proven and what's not, but I know that probably drinking this and substituting it for something that I know had this much sugar and also calories, which are I'm trying to watch, is not helping. So, I think this is a better option, but I don't want to compare it to that's like the person who picks up vaping instead of smoking. They know it's better, but I don't want to compare the two cuz I don't think it's that bad. But maybe you can shed some light on that for Well, I'll say it this way. Your logic is correct. So, by switching from a traditional cola to a cola that is zero calorie, you are making a healthier choice. That's objective. Um whether it's 100% healthier, we can't really say because everyone's body is different. Everyone's going to have different choices. But if in terms of cutting down calories, decreasing the amount of carbohydrates you're taking in, it is a healthier choice in that regard. That's why I asked you in what sense is it not healthy? Because if normally you're drinking regular tap water and all of a sudden you're going to now drinking uh low calorie soda, I wouldn't say that's a healthier choice because what happens is the sweetener that's used in a lot of these colas is still true sugar. It just your body can't absorb it. So as a result, it goes to your intestine where the bacteria can eat it and thrive on it. So as a result, you have a growth, an explosion of growth of that type of bacteria, which then can actually send signals to your brain to have you have cravings of sugary foods. Wow. So they can impact your behavior. But again, if you're So that's if you're switching from water and now you're creating this like sweet tooth mentality for yourself. But in your case, you already had a sweet tooth from drinking unhealthy soda and you're switching to a healthier alternative. I would say that's a good change for my patient to make. But in a case of like someone saying, "Oh, I'm just going to go from water to this." I would say, "Oh, not ideal. The ingredients aren't good. The artificial sugars generally are not necessary. And I would recommend to do something else." Do you think reverse osmosis or extremely pure water is actually positively affecting people just in general or negatively affecting people rather than tap? I have no idea. Because I've heard tab's actually very healthy because it has minerals and stuff that water generally speaking is really healthy to drink, especially in New York City. Like it's very well controlled. It's tested. Like even if you compare it to like a traditional spring water that we have here in New York, it our tap water has less bacteria in it than the the the spring water that we get. So like our tap water is really good in New York at least. So I don't know about the reverse osmosis systems enough about it. What do you think about the narrative being thrown around that like you should eat like all meat diet, ignore vegetables? It's it all falls into that same extreme thing. Remember the body is a balance. Everything is a balance and there's no way that going extreme in one direction is going to be the solution. But don't you think for some very unique specific people out certain things and using outliers to create rules is the worst way to create rules. So I'm making general guidelines here. I can't make guidelines off outliers because if I did, then I'd be telling all you guys to run full marathons with broken shins and and be eat raw liver and eat raw liver and all this other stuff, which is not what guidelines are supposed to do. Guidelines are supposed to be middle of the road with exceptions made for individuals. Wow, that's really interesting. I could have told you that, Jack. I I have an interesting uh shift here. So, I just want to know what was going through your mind when you first did Creator Clash because the first thing that I thought of was and I'm sure a lot of people Why is a doctor? He's a doctor. Is he really going to get into that ring and punch somebody else in the face? Yeah, that was unexpected. Yeah. The oath to do no harm to get into the ring there. Um, it it was scary for obviously that reason, but also from a health perspective, knowing what could happen taking shots to the head. That's not healthy, especially with all the research that's out there on CTA. Which is why when I was doing it, I very was explicit with my audience that this is a risk I'm willing to take. I do not recommend this for anyone. In fact, I want you to take away from this to go move, to go take a boxing class, but not to become a professional fighter. This is something extreme that I'm doing. And by labeling extreme, hopefully I'm explaining to everybody that this is not what 99% of the the people watching me should do. What were some of the risks though? the realistic risks of getting in the ring. I'm not talking about the outliers, but like what could happen in an average I mean brain damage. How common would you say that that is or what what would it take to I wouldn't say it's common. Yeah. Especially if you're not inept in the ring, but it's it's realistic to happen. So it's not common, but it's not out of the ordinary for it to happen. So like you want to be aware of that risk going in like a car crash. I think a car crash would probably happen more often. I think like the rates and again we should ask an actuary this but like I think car accidents happen way more frequently than a serious negative outcome from a controlled boxing environment. But why did you want to take that risk? I really love boxing. I was doing it for a while. Um, I wanted to take the challenge and I thought it was a calculated risk because I wasn't stepping in the ring with um, you know, Jon Jones or some like UFC monster or pro boxer. I was stepping in against Idubbbz who I felt we were on at least the same enough level that the damage wouldn't be that far that if I had to take some damage. Got it. You did a great fight. You were wildly in shape. It made me feel like what am I doing with my life, man? Well, what was that diet like or what was your I had to lose uh quite a bit of weight. I was like 208 when I started and I had to cut down to like 190. I I cut down to 188 to fight with Ian. Um so actually I wasn't dieting anything specific. Just when you're working out twice a day, six days a week, you're burning so many calories that even if you eat 2500 3,000 calories, you're still going to be losing weight. So I was eating normally but still losing weight because I was training so much. Wow. How is your business today broken down? I'm curious what's sort of the top of the funnel. Yeah, so it's I mean it's all social media driven obviously. Um brand deals probably number one on that funnel. Um AdSense is up there. And then you have your alternative income that comes in from speaking engagements like because I have a production company, we do productions for other people that I'm not involved in. So things like that. And why did you start the podcast? you just started one. I really like it. I see the the clips on TikTok all the time. I really enjoy having those conversations. Um I think that there's a space to have those conversations about demystifying health like we're doing right now with people who are very influential because it seems like when people get sick, they feel very disconnected and lonely that they have this condition no one else does. And I'm hoping that my podcast will show that everyone suffers with this. Whether you're the most famous comedian of all time or one of the most uh successful athletes, you do have troubles with your physical health. You do have troubles with your mental health. You have problems in our shitty health care system. And I think bringing that to the general public will break a lot of stigma and hopefully decrease some of that loneliness that we experience. That's interesting. I really liked when you talked about uh talked with Barbara about her skin care. Yeah, she had a skin cancer scare that her plastic surgeon of all people found and um she was really open about her health. I've actually found that everyone coming on has been really open of sharing their um their health histories, which it's funny as a doctor, I'm so careful with HIPPA uh to be sure that they they they're very open and want to share it and are taking that uh that chance on me. But it's cool. I I I like the business aspect of what we do and I'm very responsible with it. Again, because I'm a doctor, I have to be really careful with what I recommend and the endorsements I take on. But somehow we've uh turned this into a very successful uh venture. And where are you investing? I'm maximally diversified. Um I have REITs, funds, index funds, um some crypto, small amount. Um I love watches. I have some watches. I notice what what are you wearing? I've never seen is the all black. Is that the ceramic? This is the ceramic uh perpetual calendar AP. When did you get that? Um a few years ago. Good uh time to buy. Good time to buy. Yes. So, it sounds like you've bought a lot of these watches before they just exploded in value. Yeah, exactly. So, I was very fortunate with my timing and uh I want to warn everyone that has seen that happen and think that watches are a great investment. They're absolutely not. They should not be viewed as a form of investment. Um, maybe some watches, depending on the brands and selections from within that brand, can hold some value, but the reason you should get a watch is because you love the watch. You love wearing it. That's like what you're getting the enjoyment from because it's not going to be the monetary aspect. It's not it's not a good way to hold value. I even recently bought some gold that I was really excited about. Yeah. I I physical gold or like really or So, it's funny. I uh I wanted to buy 1 kilogram of gold and I messaged my friend who works on 47th Street in New York and I said, "Hey man, I want to buy that." He goes, "Sure, come on in." And I went in and I brought a book bag for the gold. And when I walked in, he hands me like this little thing. And I'm like, "Oh, what's this?" Tiny. And I thought this is like he's showing me kind of a print or something, like a sample of what he's going to sell me. And he's like, "There you go." And I'm like, "Wait, this is it? A kilo of gold is like a business card and it's like right now 62 64 grand. I'm like hold on a second. This is I I viewed Hollywood gold. You know those like bars go and I thought that's what I was getting. That's actually like 12 or 14 kilos and way more money. The actual kilo of gold is tiny. I was really surprised. There was a house I showed in Hollywood. I have a picture somewhere. I could try to find it where in the entry off to the left is a framed picture built into the wall with tamperproof glass and there is a brick of gold in there and I think I was calculating at that time and this must have been 2010 2011 I think it was like 800,000 $900,000 worth of gold in that one brick and it was showcased in the wall of the house. Yeah, gold is expensive and I don't really have a good reason as to why. I just kind of want to diversify. By the way, for decor, you could buy big bars of copper. Really not that much money. Okay. I wasn't buying it for decor. Oh, I'm just saying if you want a cool like looking thing here, just Yeah. For decor, just have gold just laying around. Little business card. We don't do that well here. But um speaking of, you know, doing well and making money, um have you ever felt a pressure to like, how do I explain it? Ali Abdal was a very successful doctor on YouTube and he pivoted away from from that. Now have you ever felt pressure of like why do because you still practice. Have you ever felt pressure of like why should I keep practicing uh medicine when I make way more money doing this online and of course you know you want to stay sharp and stuff but what is the factor behind you making that decision? It's like full love of the game. So I work right now two or three days a week in the hospital. And when I say a hospital, I mean outpatient center. Um, and I I basically do that for free. And I do that because I genuinely enjoy being there. And there was a period of time when I finished my residency that I initially got a license to practice medicine in New York, but then my hospital hired me. So I had to get a New Jersey license, which took some administrative time, like two months to get filled out. And during those two months, I was still doing TV, I was doing YouTube, and I was talking about medicine, but I wasn't practicing it. and it felt fraudulent. I didn't feel like I was really connected to the information because now when I talk about a subject, I'm thinking about the patient that I saw last week that had this condition. So when I when I hear people say, "Oh, do you have insomnia? Just take magnesium. That's going to help you. I guarantee it." You see Tik Toks like that all the time. I get pissed at those because I think about my patient who's truly suffering with anxiety or insomnia and is struggling with their life and has nothing to do with taking a supplement because they have a true medical problem. And I get mad at those Tik Toks because I'm like, you don't see patients. You don't see what they're really going through and you promising this miracle cure all is not fair to that person. So, I never want to lose that aspect of truly being there for patients. And during the times where social media is not going well or you may be getting some hate online or whatever it is, going to the hospital and doing the things that people would consider boring or working long hours, tedious paperwork have been some of the most fulfilling moments over the last 5 years. Surprisingly, you would never guess that. But I love that. And I'm also working with my same family that I've been with 10 years who knew me before social media popularity. So they saw me work as a doctor before I became popular. So they kind of know where I'm coming from. But what about your patients now? Do they come in and be like, "Oh crap, that Dr. Mike don't know." They don't. No, they have real life problems. They don't watch YouTube. So it's cool. I would walk, oh man, it's sometimes. Yeah. Like sometimes like do they do they recognize you? they get nervous or well now like so if like they call ahead for an appointment they get scheduled with me they might look up a doctor cuz that's like kind of reflexive these days for review sites and then they'll see my social media so they'll know that way but most reflexively don't know I think we just lost battery on one of those so I think it's time y thank you so much for coming to you before we end we got to look at how the video performed out one out of 10 let's go we did a one guys to the moon good Thanks, man. I really appreciate it. Of course. This is awesome. This was my third podcast today. Really? This is today. Say again.