Dr Mike: The Top 10 Lies Health Experts Have Told You – DOAC Podcast

I think that’ll be a cool opportunity. And they do the pre interviews, I meet with the producers, I tell them about what I’m passionate about and the day before filming, they call and they say, “hey, we have some news. Hillary Clinton is announcing her bid for the presidency of the United States and she’s doing our daytime talk show as the first talk show.” And the other guests were Pink and Jimmy Kimmel. So you’re the one getting kicked off.

And I said, no biggie, I’ll go on Steve Harvey. So I call Steve Harvey’s people back and they said, “oh, no, that was two weeks ago. We’re not interested anymore.” And it was such a wake up call where the 15 minutes of fame statement was true. You were hot for a second. People were interested about this unique story and then they move on.

But I said, no way. I still have to push this because I viewed it as an opportunity to get people to care about the information, but drawing their attention to something else first. If you look at who’s successful in media 20 years ago in the healthcare space, it would be unfortunately, people who corrupted the health information for the viewership. And it feels like you oftentimes have to corrupt something to get views.

And I felt that if I could corrupt and have people come for the scandal of “sexy doctor,” but when they come for that, I instead give them some accurate information or maybe have them come for some comedy and give them some health information, that was a way to get people interested.

Because if we’re being honest, health care information, textbooks, science, it can be boring if you’re not passionate about it. But if you can present it in a way, some of the amazing teachers that I’ve had over the years, in a way where it’s fun, it’s engaging, they make it almost a journey that you’re going on, suddenly you pay attention, you have a few takeaways, and then from those takeaways you’re better equipped to handle some of the things they couldn’t come up with during life.

And I really took that to heart in the beginning. And over the last five years, have really studied what marketers have done so well in the commercial space or what those snake oil salesmen have done so well in pitching their misinformation and take those same principles but bring them to evidence based medicine. Allow people to have fun while they’re learning.

Framework for Evaluating Health Information

STEVEN BARTLETT: There’s a lot of information out there as it relates to health. What is your sort of framework for deciding what you share and how you share it when there’s so many? A lot of these studies as well. The methodology of the studies is often hard to trust because of the way that, you know, certain studies where they look at kind of, they don’t isolate one variable.

So you look at the study and it could be anything. They say, you know, you hear these studies about veganism for example, where they say veganism is healthier, but that doesn’t remove out all the other factors in that person’s lifestyle. Maybe, okay, maybe they’re eating less meat, but it’s processed meat that they’re having with fries and hamburgers, et cetera. So how do you, what’s your framework for deciding if something is true in a sea of information?

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: Every time I look at some new research, I treat it differently than most people would in the media space and I also treat it differently than an individual who would treat it. So if you’re a news outlet and a breakthrough study comes out, they treat it as the answer to people’s problems, as the new and best.

I take that research and I apply it to the existing data and knowledge that I’ve gotten over the years through my medical education and position it in where it belongs. So some research comes out, it might make me lean in saying we need to move closer to a plant focused diet. It doesn’t mean that everyone needs to be on it doesn’t mean we need to eliminate everything.

Because in medicine extremes are rarely right. Even when we’re talking about optimization, you’ll hear oftentimes people say, “oh, you can boost your immune system. You could hyper optimize this.” No, no, no, hyper optimization is extreme. Whenever you’re going into those extremes, you start creating problems because that’s how the human body works. It works in homeostasis. It wants to be balanced. And the enemy of balance is bad, but also perfect.

The Optimization and Longevity Culture

STEVEN BARTLETT: So what do you make of this optimization? Longevity, anti aging, live forever culture that’s emerged in the last couple of years.

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: I understand where it’s coming from. We’ve made a lot of scientific progress. We believe that we should have the answers to the one problem that is facing all of us, and that’s that life is not forever. But I feel the field has been corrupted and it’s actually the way that health care has been corrupted across the board.

So when we talk about health insurance, the pharma industry, anti aging industry, a lot of it has been corrupted with capitalism. And I take and I say that as someone who’s actually pro capitalism, but I believe healthcare is a commodity that cannot be uberized. I love Uber. I love Lyft. I love the idea of being able to call something on demand doesn’t quite work for healthcare.

Demanding what you want for your body when you’re not the expert doesn’t always yield the best results. We’ve seen that time and time again. I see it with my patients when they come in and it’s very clear that they have a viral illness, but they demand antibiotics or they demand a medication that’s going to help them live longer. It doesn’t exist.

We don’t have yet the evidence to sell these things to people, to explain them to people. But there will always be a person who will take some new information, some preliminary data, data from an animal model, from a petri dish, and sell it as the next great thing. This happened with the fountain of youth, this happened with literally snake oil hundreds of years ago, and now it’s happening.

But with the power of social media and the fact that this misinformation a lot of times is insidious, you don’t realize that it’s so bad and so problematic because what it’s doing is it’s actually tricking people into not understanding how science works, how when we put out a hypothesis, an idea of what we think could happen, we actually strive to disprove our hypothesis.

So if I say this glass of water here will help you live longer, I will actually, as a scientist, want to set out to prove that it doesn’t. And I will think of every way and I would bring on people to disagree with me and find ways that we could test that this doesn’t work. But right now on social media, what you see is a lot of people just supporting what agrees with them.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What are some of those ideas that have proliferated across social media that irritate you the most and you think are most harmful?

The Gray Zone of Health Information

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: I think the ones that create certainty in an uncertain world. And I think that could apply to pretty much any field. I talked about the gray zone earlier and I think the gray zone has changed.

Thirty years ago the gray zone was weight loss. And if you put on any TV channel, especially late at night, there would be a fat burner, there’d be some grapefruit diet or some next great thing that someone came up with. But everyone forgets about all that. People used to sell you nonsense to try and help you lose weight and all of it didn’t work. It was not healthy. Even if it made you lose weight, it was in an unhealthy way. It ended up creating and fueling this almost eating disorder like cycle for most folks.

And then came out some medications like Ozempic and people started actually losing weight with an FDA approved medicine that had real results. Now you see less of those fat burner ads, but you see more of a new gray zone. Anti aging. Science doesn’t have an answer to stop us from aging. We don’t have the answers perfectly to our genetic code, but boy, there will be a genetic test for sale that will tell you exactly what you need to avoid. But the reality is we just don’t know.

And it’s not sexy to say “I don’t know.” But I’ve been passionate about encouraging folks to celebrate those experts who come in and say, “here’s what we don’t know, but here’s how we’re working to get to those answers” because that’s what gets me excited. There’s so many breakthroughs being made in medicine and we don’t talk about those honest breakthroughs because they’re not always exciting. But if we could pair it with something cultural, if we could pair it with some comedy, with some fun, I think we can get in front of a lot of eyes.

The Ozempic Discussion and Natural Approaches

STEVEN BARTLETT: One of the first things you said there was about weight loss and Ozempic and it’s this incredibly relevant and widely discussed subject at the moment. As Ozempic, I listen to the research on Ozempic and I am someone that typically has a bias towards not taking medications if I can and pursuing a natural route.

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: And that is what we do too.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: Which is understated in most circles as doctors.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, yeah.

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: So our training, for example, if you look at our, we have a reference called UpToDate. It’s a medical platform where we could go and get guidance on any medical condition and it could tell us what the epidemiology is, who gets sick with it, what is the diagnosis that we should do to try and make it like what laboratory testing, what imaging we should do, what treatments work, first line, second line, third line, et cetera. If we look at pretty much any chronic disease treatment, whether it’s high blood pressure, sugar management from diabetes, all of the first steps is lifestyle modifications. That’s what we’re taught.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is that because of the type of training you had, doctor you became or is that all medical doctors?

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: That is all medical doctors. But what ends up happening is twofold. One, patients love a shortcut. They love having a medication potentially do the work that they may not be able to or don’t want to. It’s difficult to generalize here because some patients truly have difficult lives. They have three jobs, they’re a single parent, they’re having a mental health crisis. So they may not be able to do those lifestyle changes. But then there’s a portion of us who could do it but prefer to take the shortcut. And that’s pretty human of us. We would like to get the shortcut, we would like to take the edge.

The Reality of Healthcare Shortcuts

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is there such a thing as a shortcut in healthcare?

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: No. And I heard you actually say it on your last podcast covering Ozempic that there is no shortcut. There are side effects and trade offs to everything. And you’re absolutely right in that there is no such thing as just something that is all good.

Hydration, you can’t live without it. Over drink, you’ll throw off your electrolytes, you could damage your brain, you could lose your life. Carrots, healthy food, I would say eat enough, you’ll turn orange. Same thing goes for medications. And that’s why when people go and villainize treatments, medications, supplements, it just depends and there needs to be nuance. It’s too hard to paint medicine with a broad brush. But social media makes that really tempting.

Personalized Approach to Weight Loss

STEVEN BARTLETT: That non-Ozempic path. If I’m not going to take the new sort of fat burning magic pills or the appetite, I guess they suppress appetite magic pills, that becomes another still is a bit of a gray area in many respects because on the drug side of things, people now have an option that’s FDA approved. But if they don’t want to pursue that path, there’s still all of this other information around. Okay, I want to lose weight and there’s lots of opportunity for a lot of people to present them with solutions. There’s a roaring debate around calories which seems to just be never ending. And I wanted to get your take on that if someone was, you know, in your training when you’ve been advised to suggest lifestyle changes. First and foremost, if I’m trying to lose a bit of weight, I’m at risk of being diabetic or something, what would you say to me as your patient?

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: It would be hard to generalize it because it really depends on what pre existing conditions exist. What have you tried thus far? What works, what do you have time for? What do you have budget for?

STEVEN BARTLETT: On that point of tried thus far? Why does that matter so much?

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: If I have a patient who’s tried dieting and failed and I don’t ask that question and I recommend dieting, they may not take the advice, they may nod because they want to be a “good patient” and leave and say not doing it. But if I ask that question, they can say they tried and failed. Then that gives me an opportunity to ask what exactly did they try? Did they try some really restrictive diet that’s out there, Carnivore, keto, what have you. And that set them up for failure, something that wasn’t able to be sustainable. Whereas now I can explain that, “hey, the thing you tried actually set you up for failure. And here’s a more reasonable recommendation that we can try.” And now I can actually be a doctor that recommends a dietary modification that could help them.

The Foundation of Successful Dieting

STEVEN BARTLETT: What’s the key to finding a diet that is successful? From your experience, what are the foundational factors of that diet that’s going to typically make it stick?

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: There’s two real things that you need to think about when it comes to dieting. One is its impact on your weight, because calories in and calories out, as non sexy as it sounds, as clinical and cold and heartless as it sounds, is true. Second, you also need to think about the nutrients in your food. Because if we just take one of those parts and ignore the other, we can get into a really bad place.

I can even see those grapefruit diets that people say “eat three grapefruits a day and you’ll lose weight.” Yeah, you will, because you’re under consuming calories. But is that healthy? From a nutrition side, absolutely not. On the other side is you can get enough protein, enough nutrients. But if you’re overeating calories, you can get into a metabolic problem where now you’re carrying excess weight and increasing your risks of all sorts of conditions.

So the goal is to get you in a place where it’s balanced in both a caloric weight management standpoint, but also in ideally a healthy nutritional balance as well. And what that means, person to person is going to vary. It’s going to vary based on the medical condition they have. Some patients who are anemic may need certain nutrients that someone who’s not anemic doesn’t need. Someone who’s prone to kidney stones may need a slightly different diet than someone who is IBS prone.

So we need to always take into account that generalized advice isn’t great when it comes to healthcare, especially when it’s very easy to create buzzy statements from truth in healthcare. I said on a podcast not too long ago that exercise for weight loss almost doesn’t matter. And that’s a buzzy statement because on one hand it’s true. But you also need to pair it with some nuance and say exercise has so many benefits outside of weight loss of why it’s important to participate in exercise. And the idea of weight loss needs to come from nutrition. That’s where the majority of the change will come from.

Exercise vs. Diet for Weight Loss

STEVEN BARTLETT: Super interesting, because I’ve sat here with so many people that have said that to me. They’ve said that when you look at a lot of the studies, exercise as a, if you prescribe someone exercise to lose weight, they probably won’t lose weight. But I would definitely say that in culture, people see exercise as the many would see, I reckon, the primary way you lose weight. They think you have to go for a run to lose weight. And again, you’ve expressed the nuance there. But even I struggled with understanding that because over here, people say exercise isn’t super useful for weight loss in the studies. But then the prevailing narrative in society is that if you want to lose weight, you’ve got to get on a running machine.

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: That’s because they’re equating in their minds health with a magazine cover. And health is not a magazine cover. They think that you need to have big muscles to be considered healthy. And while you can have big muscles and be healthy, you can have big muscles and be tremendously unhealthy. So just looking at someone’s appearance doesn’t give you the full picture, just like looking at someone’s weight doesn’t give you the full picture. You need to know more.

And when it comes to exercise and weight loss, let’s just take for a very simple example, I used to go to the movies when I was a kid. I loved it. I did it all the time. It is not unusual to eat a tub of popcorn, a little candy bar and a soda well over a thousand calories. Do you know how hard it is through exercise to burn off a thousand extra calories? Most of us are not physically even equipped to burn a thousand calories during an exercise session. So it’s just about the science of not being able to out exercise a bad diet.

The Trap of “Good” Foods

STEVEN BARTLETT: What if I just eat loads of salads? I think I’ve been in that mindset before where I thought, well, it’s just really, I could have. Well, I’ve been in periods of my life where I’ve just eaten more and more and more good stuff, quote, unquote good stuff. Things that I thought were good, but I also didn’t lose weight.

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: You’re a really smart person. You’re a person that wants to be as effective as you can in your podcast, in your communication style, and you’re amazing at it. You want to do the same thing with your diet. And the hacks and tricks that you use in your business mind, in your communication mind, don’t work for healthcare. You cannot find the shortcut of the salad that’s going to fix everything that bothers you of the probiotic miracle supplement. It’s not going to be there.

That’s why some of the minds that actually end up falling for the most simplest forms of misinformation are those who are really good at business. Because the things that work very well in the business world, in the communication space don’t work in health care. Because health care is not a commodity. Healthcare does not work well with extremes. You cannot do something so good all the time without it having negative repercussions.

You want to be good, not perfect when it comes to healthcare. And the more you try and chase perfect, number one, you’re going to get the negative response. But also number two, you’re going to create anxieties, worries that are also toxic to your body. So you have to be very careful. So perfect is not only just an illusion, it’s a toxic illusion.

The Complexity of Calories In, Calories Out

STEVEN BARTLETT: I saw someone talking recently about the calories in, calories out thing. And the first comment was a lady who I think had a pre existing condition, basically saying, “because of my pre existing condition, the calories in, calories out thing does not work for me. I’ve tried it.” And then the health influencer responded and said “it works for everybody.”

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: Both statements are true.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay?

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: Dialectics are common in healthcare where two opposing ideas can both be true. Someone can try and do calories in, calories out, which through science works, but the application of it can fail.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Well, I’m thinking not about the application in the science of it, is it regardless of whether I have a pre existing condition?

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: Not regardless. Pre existing conditions is part of the application. The individual is part of the application.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I think she was making the case that because of that pre existing condition that the maths of it don’t apply to her. Like it doesn’t actually work on her body. It shifts versus the application. Okay?

The Reality of Medical Treatment

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: It absolutely shifts. And that’s the truth for most medicine. When I try and get my patients into a healthy blood pressure range, because we know that having a resting blood pressure above a certain number predisposes you to having risks of heart attack, stroke, all these cardiovascular conditions, when I treat them with a medication after lifestyle changes either didn’t work or they weren’t able to go down that route, we have this really unique knowledge public health wise.

We know that controlling the blood pressure on a large scale will lower deaths significantly, will lower heart attacks significantly. But by me medicating this one patient, I have no idea if it’s going to help this individual. But that’s because all we’re doing in medicine is doing our best with the limited information that we have on hand.

The True Benefits of Exercise

STEVEN BARTLETT: Closing off on that point about exercise. So if we shouldn’t be thinking about exercise as a way to lose weight, what is the sort of medical advantage, the physiological advantage for me, if I go to the gym every day and I’m active?

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: Literally everything else. If I could bottle the effects of exercise and sell it, I’d be the richest person on earth. Happiness, mood, social connections, strength, ability to decrease cancer risk, increase ability to fight off cancer, increase longevity. Literally everything else is the benefit of exercise.

And I say that as someone who’s been very exercise focused. But over the last few months I’ve kind of fallen off, I’ve gained some weight, I haven’t been exercising as much as I want because sometimes life gets hard, life gets in the way, things become problematic. Mental health sometimes takes a struggle and we need to be aware that that can happen.

The idea that we need to make every person perfect, or if they’re not perfect, they’re a failure. That’s such a dangerous rabbit hole to go into. How much exercise is going to vary person to person. General guidelines say 150 minutes of moderate intensity exercise per week, which isn’t a lot. Two and a half hours. Moderate intensity, meaning that you shouldn’t be able to speak full sentences, maybe one sentence at a time until you’re out of breath is a simple way to put it.

Major Health Concerns in Western Society

STEVEN BARTLETT: When you have such a broad view on medicine, and I noticed that in your content, I was like this guy really knows. He really has a much more broad view than the neuroscientist I spoke to yesterday who’s really focused on maybe one part of the body. With that broad view, what are you concerned about in terms of macro social trends, the direction of travel that we’re going in with our health? We talked about misinformation and disinformation, but actual realities of the Western healthcare condition.

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: First of all, I think it’s important that we have both individuals participating and having a seat at the table. The broad view primary care physician and the single point expert neuroscientist like you had on your podcast before. We need both. In fact, where I’m able to gather my information from is from all those researchers that are putting in those hours at the bench, making sure that they’re checking their biases, showing the flaws of their own research. Without them, I am nothing. Where did I get my knowledge from? From them. So we absolutely need to do this in a teamwork approach.

I think the big problem that we face today is two things. One, the loss of trust in our healthcare world, that’s huge. People don’t trust healthcare advice. They don’t trust our agencies. Frankly, the loss of trust of doctors has been rather shocking over the last decade.

And then second is it’s more of a philosophical issue that I raise because I don’t know where it’s going to go. Where we’ve created this world of processed foods, unhealthy foods, foods that cause us to eat more and more and more and feel not satiated. And then we’ve come up with a medication to solve that. We’ve created apps that pull our attention spans, that allow us to focus 10, 15 seconds at a time before we swipe to the next thing. Now, a lot of people are requesting prescriptions for ADHD medications.

There’s people who want to stay out all night and party and still maintain their physical gains. They get on testosterone early when they don’t need to. How hypermedicated are we going to get as a society to a point of actually harming us? And I don’t know the answer to it. I’m not smart enough to know the answer to that. But I think it’s a good philosophical question to ask ourselves.

Pandemic Preparedness and Trust

STEVEN BARTLETT: Are you scared about what would happen if we had a pandemic that is 10 times more deadly than the previous pandemic breakout? Are you scared because of that loss of trust?

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: The more deadly the pandemic, a lot of times the less problematic it is. Isn’t that weird?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh, okay.

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: So initial SARS virus was significantly more deadly than SARS CoV-2, which is the virus that causes COVID-19. So initially, when the reports came out about the lethality rate of SARS CoV-2 COVID-19, we said, “Oh, well, it’s not as bad as SARS. We’ll be okay.” Because most people with SARS got really sick, they lost their lives.

But because asymptomatic spread was the thing with COVID, meaning that you could feel fine or maybe just have the sniffles and spread it, it killed millions more people. And that brings me back to that point of when I said insidious misinformation can be more problematic than true disinformation. Because when something doesn’t seem so bad, we can allow it to go much further and cause much more harm. Complacency can be dangerous.

STEVEN BARTLETT: We’re good.

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: But when you look at it and you zoom out macro, oh my God, it’s wreaking havoc across the world. And I’ve actually equated this to vaping. Vaping is not as harmful as cigarettes on paper, but because the odor is not as offensive, it’s easier to hide. You could do it much quicker and get a bigger dose because it feels like it’s not as harmful. Many more people can get hooked on it.

The Dangers of Vaping

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is vaping dangerous?

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Why? So many of my friends vape, I think three out of my six best friends, they’re just absolutely addicted and they never smoked.

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: Interestingly, that’s the issue of it that it gets people who maybe would have been turned off by smoking to try. And the chemicals found inside are really rewarding to the brain, nicotine being a prime example of it. And the more dangerous part of it is with kids who have a developing frontal lobe, meaning that the part of their brain that is responsible for complex decision making is not yet fully formed.

So they’re incredibly susceptible to anything that can build a tolerance, a dependence, an addiction to. And it could change the chemistry of their brain moving forward. So we don’t want to make it easier for them to start smoking. Vaping should be used as a tool as a way of getting you off of cigarettes, not as a way of introducing you to cigarettes or nicotine at all.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is it dangerous for adults as well?

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: If you’re coming off cigarettes? No, it’s a good choice.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But if you were never… all my friends that vape never smoked.

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: Yeah, it’s not something that carries value health wise and can only potentially harm.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Have they done any… I guess it’s super difficult to do studies on these kinds of things. But is there any studies that have been done around vaping?

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: Yeah, there’s been vaping related lung injury where that’s its own diagnosis code now. There’s been children that have been hospitalized with it. There’s been even technical problems of the devices blowing up in people’s faces. So it’s not the fact that I’m trying to fear monger here and say vaping is the devil. I’m here trying to explain that vaping can be problematic because on the surface it may not look as harmful by comparison.

Risk Assessment and Personal Choice

STEVEN BARTLETT: Everything is trade offs. It’s so interesting. When I see all my friends vaping, they’re all in… we’re all in Dubai a couple of about a year ago and I thought I’d pass me because they will have these little disposable vape things now. So let me try it. And I tried it and it was really nice and I thought, “Oh God, I could get into this.” And if it’s not unhealthy because we all know that smoking is unhealthy, I thought, you know, your head, you think, “Oh, what’s the harm?” I could have so easily got into it.

Luckily I just, I’m always skeptical when I don’t know the side effect. I would rather accept the side effects and it be super clear than to someone say to me there’s no side effects. When someone says there’s no side effects…

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: Well, that’s like the whole nature fallacy when someone’s like, “Oh, but this is natural.” First of all, what does that mean? Because they say vitamins are natural, but they’re made in a lab. I don’t know how that’s considered natural. And also just because something natural doesn’t mean it’s safe. Arsenic, cyanide, natural but deadly.

The ADHD Discussion

STEVEN BARTLETT: The ADHD point you mentioned.

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What are you seeing as a doctor? Over the last couple of years, the term ADHD neurodiversity has seems to have become more and more prevalent. Everywhere I look, it feels like I’m hearing a conversation around ADHD now. Is that because there’s been a social sort of heightened awareness to the subject and now people are getting diagnosed more? Are we creating more ADHD somehow or is it somewhere in between?

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: Yeah, I assume it’s something in between. I don’t have a clear answer to it. I do know that neurodivergence needs to be talked about more. And that’s not just from the ADHD perspective. It’s also from autism spectrum disorder situation as well, where folks are going to be different. And some people want treatment for a condition, others don’t. And we have to respect people’s autonomy.

Even when we talk about something like vaping. If an adult wants to vape, as long as I can convey to them as their doctor the risks, everyone’s free to make their own decisions. No one lives a life where they say, “I’m going to take no risks.” Everyone has a different risk tolerance level. Everyone is comfortable with a different level of care in life. Some people want more care, some people want less care, even at the end of life.

I have discussions with my patients for end of life care often and a lot of times they’re shocked by it. They’re like, “Wait, do you think something’s wrong with me? I’m 30 years old. Why are you talking?” This is the time to talk about it. When you’re healthy, when you aren’t facing a decision that you have to make right now, that’s when you’re going to be able to spend some time and think about what kind of medical care you want.

You know, I’m a doctor here that became a professional boxer a couple of years ago. That is not healthy. I do not recommend it. It increases all sorts of risks for head injury, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, all of that is true. It’s a risk that I was willing to accept because I studied the risks, I accepted the risks. I don’t doubt the risks, but it’s something that I’m passionate about and I wanted to go down that route, enjoying it very much. So it’s a great outlet for me.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Why did you choose boxing despite the risks?

The Journey Through Grief and Finding Boxing

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: Yeah, I would say that boxing probably chose me instead of me choosing boxing. I did taekwondo growing up, so I was in martial arts for eight, nine years. And then when I was in medical school, I unfortunately lost my mom to cancer.

And that was a really strong wake up call for me. Being in the medical field, knowing what it’s like to be in the room to ask the doctors to stop doing chest compressions on your mom. I mean, that is not something that I wish on anyone. That’s the worst thing you can experience. Especially when my father was there, also a doctor who was saying, “no, keep going.” But I knew it was futile. I knew we were causing more harm.

And in going through that journey, I got into a very unhealthy mental state. I didn’t leave my house except to go to class. I came home. I was socially isolated. And after a period of three, four months where that was going on, I said, “I need to get out of this. I need to take my own advice that I give to people and take the advice that you need to have action before you get motivation.”

And the action that I took was to go on Guilt City. Do you remember that app? It’s like a Groupon esque app where you can get a coupon to a class. And I got a coupon for a boxing class and I went and did this boxing session. And then I ended up boxing for 10 years after that session, fell in love with the sport. And then a couple years ago, I ended up fighting on Showtime pay per view in front of an audience of 15,000 people.

And it’s been a unique journey. So while it’s easy to vilify boxing and say that it’s problematic for some people, if the trade off is right, it might be something that they could participate in and it could be very healthy for them.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Losing your mother, for anybody, I think is just something that is unimaginably, unimaginably painful. But in the circumstances that you lost your mother, where, from what I understood, she was given the all clear at one point with her.

The Cruel Reality of Medical Treatment

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: Yeah, so she had this unique form of cancer called CLL. And this is usually a cancer of old age where you get diagnosed with it and you end up dying of something else other than that cancer. But she had a unique, more aggressive form of CLL where they needed to really ramp up treatment.

And her treatment took a toll on her body. Like she did not look the same post treatment. She did not feel the same. But it was all in the hopes of curing this cancer. And I remember very vividly, I was going to Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital to pick her up one day and she actually fell waiting for me at the waiting area.

So the doctor came down and talked to me and said, “maybe we should keep her observation for a day or so. But overall she’s doing great. She’s just very weak from the treatment.” And he shook my hand in that moment and said, “she’s cured. There’s no more cancer in her body. Now we just got to get her to recover from all these treatments.” And that’s the greatest news. Anyone can hear your hopes, 10 out of 10.

And just a few short days later, her weakness got so severe that she got a very unique type of bacteria called gram negative in her blood, causing gram negative sepsis. Spread throughout her body. She required the use of presser medication to artificially raise her blood pressure to prevent her organs from dying. And it didn’t work. And unfortunately, she lost her life.

And one of the hardest moments there was watching my father go through this, who, with my mom, sacrificed our lives to bring us to the United States as immigrants, gave up their lives. He went to medical school for a second time in his life. She went to university after having a PhD in Russia to learn English and be able to teach students math here in the States. It was painful to watch my dad go through it. So I think for the first few months, my focus was more on him than it was even on myself.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Did that experience change your perspective of medicine and the medical industry in any way? Because in that moment, a doctor. A doctor turned to you and said, your mother is cured. And it wasn’t the. It sounds like it wasn’t the cancer itself that did the harm. It was the treatment for the cancer that did the harm.

Learning to Process Grief and Adversity

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: I never was mad at the doctor for saying that. It would have been easy to in a situation like that where you thought you were good, but then it wasn’t. It taught me a lesson about how life can be cruel and take things away from you very quickly. After just receiving good news, I remember sharing a meme on my Instagram that it had, like, “you, colon, I’m actually happy right now.” And then “life, colon, hang on a second.” And that’s kind of how life is.

So it taught me to be able to bounce back from adversity and realize that you have to put one foot in front of the other while still being able to feel. Because repressing emotions in the short term is a valuable tool. You know, if you’re unable to function in terms of high stress in the moment, you could lose your life. You could make a really bad decision. You could harm others. You might not be able to successfully hold down a job, but if you do that for a really long period of time, even that as an acute coping strategy can become toxic.

And I was getting into that point where it was becoming chronic, and I was blocking my feelings of not mourning my mom, not having the proper process. And for everyone, that process will be different.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You moved in with your father after that?

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: Yep.

STEVEN BARTLETT: If I was a fly on the wall in that household at that time, what would I have observed?

Finding Healing Through Unexpected Means

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: Two gentlemen trying to raise a dog very poorly. That’s probably not what you expected, but I. In trying to always find some kind of way to help, I thought by helping my dad redirect his feelings towards something else. I got a Siberian husky for him in that moment, which we always wanted a dog. Even my mom wanted the dog.

And he took some time to travel to mourn my mother’s passing. And while he was doing that, I raised the dog a little bit for a few weeks, got her at least potty trained. And then when he came home, she was there. He was typical Soviet father, yelling at me and telling me why this is a bad idea, crying, which I never saw in my father before, obviously, until the loss of my mom.

And then he started being happy. He started saying, “what should we call her?” His focus shifted. His focus shifted to going for walks with her, which allowed him to think about my mom, to not be locked into the house as so many people are when they’re going through a rough time. So while I think it was chaotic of us trying to raise this puppy together, it gave us something to bond around in a moment of tough times.

Practical Advice for Those in Crisis

STEVEN BARTLETT: There will be a lot of people listening right now that are maybe in the throes of that grief or the throes of their own sadness or depression, for whatever reason. And it’s. When you’re in the midst of the storm, it’s hard to see any way out. And you said something super interesting, which is you said you realize that, like, action comes before motivation. If I. If I’m someone that’s in that situation right now and I’m listening, what would you say to that person?

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: Put on your shoes. They’ll. You’ll go somewhere. Doesn’t matter where you’ll go. Gym. Not gym. Walk, dog park. You can go to a dog park without a dog. It’s therapy. The biggest therapy that I think I’ve ever had, and I’ve gone through traditional therapy, was going to a dog park with my dog after my mom passed away. It’s such a weird thing, but animal therapy is real.

And you know who actually gave me that advice? Speaking of Dragon’s Den? Barbara Corcoran.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh, really?

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: She said that? The way that she gets herself to exercise, because she doesn’t like to. She hates it. She’s very vocal about it. But she says next to her bed are her shoes, her athletic shoes. That if she puts them on, she’s like, “all right, well, since I have them on, I may as well go exercise.” And that one little step creates that cascade.

Look, will it work for everybody? Is this the miracle solution? No, but it’s one step. And even if you just do that one step and nothing else, the next time, it’ll be easier to put on the shoes and maybe try for the second one.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Putting on the shoes is hard as well. When you’re in that in, showering is.

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: Hard, grooming is hard. The basics of all basics is hard. That’s why when I hear advice like, “go make some friends online when you’re feeling down.” Oh, boy, that’s tough advice. That’s not easy. So the putting on the shoes thing is simple in the sense of doesn’t require others to be around you to judge you, doesn’t have any steps after that just to put on the shoes.

And if you’re at that point, seeking help from a medical professional is of utmost importance because we’ve put this stigma where if you go for mental health treatment, you’re somehow weak, but if you go for treatment for a broken bone, you’re not weak. That stigma doesn’t exist for it. And that’s strange because both things can have problems arise with it, especially from a mental health standpoint, especially with the society we find ourselves in currently. Society is the most unnatural it’s ever been for humans.

The Mental Health Impact of Social Media

STEVEN BARTLETT: How would you describe the journey you’ve been on with your own mental health?

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: I don’t know how I describe the journey. I would say, just like most people, it’s had ups and downs. I would say the thing that’s really thrown me for a loop is the social media world of it all, because of how unnatural that is.

But I feel like a lot of people are working through that without even having a social media platform. Because at the end of the day these days, everyone’s a content creator, right? Like when you make a video and it gets millions of views, you kind of know what to expect. Being a content creator, you have experience. But Johnny, Rebecca, someone else putting out a video on their social media at 16 years old, that too can get a million views. And they’re now ready for what comes with a million views.

In fact, so many people, even in the medical community reach out and say, “how do I go viral?” I’m like, “do you want to go viral?”

STEVEN BARTLETT: That’s thrown your mental health through a bit of a loop.

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: Yeah, I was obsessed with it, checking it all the time. And I wasn’t obsessed for it for the reason most people think I was obsessed with it from a place of growth. I was like, “Even if they’re 99% BS, there’s some kind of truth. There’s a kernel of truth there that I could take away and make myself better.”

And, you know, there is truth to that. I did learn a lot of things. I did prevent some mistakes. I’ve improved my content as a result of listening to negative feedback and criticism. But I’ve had to, in working with my therapist, carve out moments where I’m not in a place where that’s acceptable for me right now, where you just have to say, “I’m not in a healthy mindset to look.”

STEVEN BARTLETT: What was the symptom of the impact it was having on you?

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: Tremendous anxiety, where you’re just worried at all times, and you’re almost addicted to checking it because you want to be ahead of it, you want to be safe, you want to be able to think of a response. And when you get to that point, you’re never letting your mind rest. You’re always in fight or flight.

And when you’re in fight or flight, you’re not resting, you’re not repairing, you’re not getting good quality sleep. Even so, I know how important that is. I talk about it all the time. But as I said, we’re all not perfect. Doctors are probably the biggest hypocrites when it comes to their own health.

I guarantee you. Some of the people that have come on your podcast that talk about sleep or talk about this, they struggle with sleep. They don’t do those things. Just like some advice that I give, I don’t follow to the T, my job is just to present the evidence. So I know certain things that I should be doing better. But just because I know doesn’t mean that I’m going to be 100% following it all the time.

The Universal Nature of Human Suffering

STEVEN BARTLETT: There’s this interesting thing that I was just thinking about as you’re saying that at, like, a philosophical level, I think we’re all kind of just passing our anxiety on to someone else.

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: Like, it’s like energy cannot be destroyed and must be transferred.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I noticed this because on my podcast, I have multiple guests that often disagree with each other. And if I was to do a map of how those people are feeling, they’re all suffering.

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: Well, that’s just humanity as a whole.

The Circle of Suffering and Mental Health

STEVEN BARTLETT: They’re all really suffering. And sometimes those people are suffering because of someone else who’s suffering, and then because of someone else’s. It’s almost like this chain of suffering because of misunderstanding, a variety of different reasons. But I think, as you said, humanity as a whole, the person that’s leaving those messages or attacking you is probably also suffering in their own way. Of course, it’s a real shame, but I can’t see any way it’s going to change.

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: The circle of anxiety is an artistic way to put it for sure. But I think there’s some truth to it. You know, even from trauma, the odds are that if you’ve experienced a traumatic childhood that you will also potentially cause trauma to others. That risk does go up. And that’s also pretty common sense.

Even if you’re not looking at the medical research, you could just say that if you’ve been hurt, odds are you can hurt people. What do they say? “Hurt people hurt people too.” Right. I think that that’s like that common sense logic that does get it right.

Therapeutic Advice and Social Media Management

STEVEN BARTLETT: What’s the advice your therapist gave you that’s proven to be useful?

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: Well, the advice that you put perfectly in place of logging off, not looking at certain things at certain times of the day. I had to completely shut off my phone at certain times of the day because otherwise what happens is I would get into the cycle of, okay, I just finished in the hospital, I just filmed my video for the day, now it’s sleep time and just before going into bed, let’s check my phone one last time and search the social media sites. What people are saying. And it’s like, why?

That’s ultimately what I think probably got me healthier. Not looking at it was very good in moments of despair because during those moments I was just so fragile and it would not be a good time to look. But really where it got me is don’t look unless there’s something valuable you’re getting from looking at it.

So now if I’m in a healthy place and I feel like I’m looking and I’m doing some kind of preventive task, I’m learning from it. I’m looking at it, but I’m looking at it with some kind of intention. And that’s actually true for all of social media.

I think he was on your show as well. Dr. Robert Waldinger, who ran the longest running study at Harvard of Happiness, talked about the different usages of social media, how if you use social media passively and you just look and consume, it can be rather disheartening and make you unhappy. But if you use it to form a community, to learn from it, to better yourself, suddenly the social media may not have as bad of a health impact and can actually have a positive mental health impact.

So if I’m looking at the negative comments, I have to check in with myself: am I doing this because I’m actually benefiting from it or is it destructive in nature?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Have you ever wondered if there’s something about you that makes you more likely to look at that stuff or to care about that stuff? I’ve often wondered about that myself.

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: Yeah, I feel like I have. I think it’s a pretty natural thing. I think most people look. I think for me, I derive so much value in the work that I do on social media because this was never meant to be a financial venture. This was not some grand ideology that I had to make myself successful. This was solely because of my frustration as a practicing doctor.

The first question anyone ever asked me when I got into social media is “now that you’re doing so well, you must want to quit medicine, right? You’re probably out earning it.” Yeah, but that’s not why I do medicine. I work at a community health center. Most doctors that do really well on social media either leave medicine or maybe do concierge practice or celebrity practice or something. I work at a community health center where 50% of people don’t have insurance.

So that’s been my goal. And social media is just a tool to help me with that goal. And when I see negative comments, I view it as a threat to that goal.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Have you ever considered quitting social media?

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: Seriously? I pondered what life would be like, but I just viewed it as a negative all around. Not just for me. I just view social media such an opportunity to help people. It’s like me saying quitting medicine. I don’t want to quit medicine. I want to be there for people. I want to be valuable and useful.

In fact, I think about myself as a more practical, useful person. And every strength that everyone has can also be their weakness. So sometimes I’m too practical and that impacts you as a friend, as a partner, as a family member. So sometimes being too practical is problematic. But because of my practical nature, I want to be useful to my patients.

The Truth About Supplements and Vitamins

STEVEN BARTLETT: So let’s continue with this health related stuff. Supplements and vitamins. I wanted to get your take on that. There’s a lot of… You’ve mentioned supplements a few times in this conversation. Is that part of the gray area? Is that snake oil? What’s your point of view on supplements?

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: I want to say one sentence that is all encompassing and answers all those questions, but it’s really hard because there’s just so much nuance with it. Vitamins, we can’t live without them. We need them. Supplements, supplemental vitamins are not necessary the huge majority of the time and are often sold by people who are preying on insecurities, promising shortcuts, and honestly, people trying to get wealthy.

The evidence for almost all supplements, unless you have a very specific reason for needing to take them, is missing. And what I’ve learned through my 10 years of being a physician and the hundreds of years of practice of medicine, unless we’re certain of some benefit, introducing new things, distracting people from things that work is not a good solution.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is the harm of supplements that they don’t actually work? Again, supplements is a broad word, so probably have to be specific. Is it the harm that they don’t work? Or are you saying that we should be getting all of the things that we’re supplementing from our natural diet anyway? Or are you saying both?

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: Yes. And you can get all of your nutrients again, unless you have a specific medical condition from foods. Two, they will make you skip out on doing things that are healthy for you because you think you can take a shortcut. Three, you’re spending your limited healthcare budget, that many people have a very limited healthcare budget on things that are very expensive, making a lot of promises.

And the thing that I’m most worried about is when we enter the space of people saying you need supplements and not true medical treatments for conditions that bother them or that affect them.

STEVEN BARTLETT: If I’m someone that maybe I’m not talking about myself here, but if I’m someone that has a very, very limited diet just because of my lifestyle choices, whatever, would you recommend that individual to take a multivitamin supplement?

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: I probably wouldn’t, but if they did, I wouldn’t discourage them.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do they work? That’s what I’m trying to figure out.

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: And then the other point that I didn’t mention is that there’s harm. Everything has trade offs. There’s no such thing as no side effects. So supplements have side effects. They have interactions with medications. They can create health conditions.

The term antioxidants. Antioxidants are generally healthy. B vitamins are traditionally labeled as healthy. You have too many of them. We notice that they become pro inflammatory. But no one talks about that because you can’t really sell that. So what instead gets talked about is the promise of what they could do. But there’s harms that come from taking supplements, especially in our world where consumer labs and Consumer Reports goes and pulls supplements off the shelves to find out that they don’t have the ingredients that are listed in them because they’re not regulated by the Food and Drug Administration.

They have some ingredients at 5 to 10 times what’s on the label, like vitamin A, which is a fat soluble vitamin and can actually be really harmful. So they’re not regulated. They can cause potential harm. Their benefit, unless very clearly indicated, is in the air and not proven. Why recommend them? Why sell them?

And I say this as someone who can make a fortune. I mean, you said it yourself, 12 million subscribers. I take a little boxing selfie fit and say the reason I’m this fit is because I take whatever thing I bottled up in my house, put into those pills, whatever powder I want. No one checks it. And I could sell it and become a multimillionaire.

The Unregulated Supplement Industry

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is that true that no one checks it?

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: No one checks it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: No one checks supplements?

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: No. Right now, we could bottle up on the table our miracle formula. We can call it a miracle formula as long as we don’t make a claim that it treats a specific medical condition that requires the treatment of a medical doctor.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay.

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: And I just put buzzwords on it. So instead of saying, “this helps your depression,” I just say “depression immunity support.” Just buzzwords. Feel good, happy, natural, simple. From the earth. We could sell it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How much?

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: We don’t have to get anything cleared by anybody.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How much do you think we’d make?

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: Too much money. And that’s why it’s like, man, I understand why people do it. And there is the notion that they could potentially work. There’s always a little bit of evidence coming out that we’re just going to…

STEVEN BARTLETT: Cut to an ad break for Miracle Mood, which is on it.

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: It’s so tempting. I get it. And I get… There’s also… I don’t want to label everyone with a broad brush and say they’re evil and just trying to make money. Some people do believe that they work. They want the belief that this is what ails us as a society. And I wish that was true. I wish it was as simple as giving people some supplements or that eating eight almonds a day will extend your life by 10 years. I wish that was the case.

Gut Microbiome: Separating Fact from Fiction

STEVEN BARTLETT: The subject around gut microbiome is something that I’ve talked about a lot on this podcast because I’ve just had a lot of experts talking to me about the subject and something that I didn’t even know existed years ago. I didn’t realize there was loads of bugs in my belly. There are prebiotics, probiotics, all of these things coming out now to enhance the… What do they call it? It’s not gut flora.

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: Microbiota encompasses all of it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is there truth that prebiotics and probiotics are useful?

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: Well, there’s truth in the fact that we have all of these living organisms inside of us. There’s a very strong interconnectedness between how we feel, disease conditions and what species of those bugs exist in us. The counts by which they exist. That people who generally eat specific foods that are rich in them may have better health outcomes than those who don’t.

But manipulating those bugs has not been proven or clear in the majority of ways that people promise they do. We know consuming fiber correlates with better health, less negative health outcomes. Do we know that taking a prebiotic supplement does the same? We don’t know. Do we know that having specific bacteria in the gut gets destroyed if you have a health condition? We do know that. But does that mean reestablishing it by taking in a pill will fix that condition? We don’t know that.

But people will make that jump and say “no big deal, we’re trying to help.” But to me it’s a big deal because we’re promising something that we’re uncertain of without even some good evidence for it. There’s very few conditions that probiotics can actually help with.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What advice would you give someone that comes into your practice and you identify that they have some kind of gut related, gut microbiome related issue? Is there anything that you would recommend that they do to improve their gut microbiome?

The Microbiome and Health Advice

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: It would be focusing on foods that are considered healthy for the microbiome. So foods that are rich in fiber, plants essentially avoiding bad habits, poor quality sleep, over drinking, alcohol, smoking, all those things are unhealthy.

The thing that makes health advice so boring is that the things that grandma told us still is what I say in my office and it’s not sexy and it puts people to sleep. But it’s true. That’s what we know works. We don’t have a perfect answer as to why.

And right now there’s like tests on the market to check your microbiome to know what food too preliminary to recommend. We don’t know what to do with the information. The promises that they make don’t hold up when we look at it. Long term genetic tests potential is there for a lot of value. Most of them are very preliminary unless you’re working with a geneticist on a very specific condition.

So I think the hype oftentimes speeds up the selling of the products before the evidence is there. It outpaces the evidence. And in some instances, medicine does that too, like traditional medicine, but it does that with some thought in mind. For example, if we create an emergency use authorization or if we allow someone to have a treatment exemption for something that is not proven for a disease that’s already lethal, that they’re going to lose their life anyway, or if we don’t act now, we’re going to lose so many lives in the moment, then, yeah, there might be instances where we can speed up the process of certain things. We can create some shortcuts because we’re taking that trade off that’s thought about.

But with a lot of these products, they come and go and there’s just so much misinformation around them. And you know, like one of the big individuals that does this in this space and hate to single out, but it’s just been such a voice in this community is Gary Brecka. You know, I talked about him on my show.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Have you spoke to him?

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: No. And seems like a really good person, seems very passionate about what he’s talking about. But the promises that are being made are not proven. And the intention may be good and good intentions can have bad outcomes. But if the information is not accurate, no matter how passionate you are about the subject, long term it’s going to have negative outcomes.

The Burden of Proof in Medical Claims

STEVEN BARTLETT: When you use the word proven there, do you mean that there’s not a significant or a reliable sort of basis of research that’s been done yet to validate the hypotheses or the statements or you’re not saying that it’s been disproven, it just hasn’t been proven?

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: Yeah, so that’s a good point to bring up. The things that I say that are inaccurate largely have not been disproven. Because if I say the juice inside this cup will help you live forever, would you say that’s true or not?

STEVEN BARTLETT: My theory would be that that’s not true.

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: Right, but can you disprove it? No, you would have to run a study to disprove it. And that’s how I function as a doctor. So I can’t disprove what he’s saying because then I would have to run my own study. But based on what we do know, based on. Remember how I said at the beginning, when a new study comes out, I try and bring it to the re established information that we have. It doesn’t vibe with what we know to be true.

If you want to go against public health standards, from what we’ve established as science, you better have a good reason for doing it. And if you do, I’m all ears. I’m excited for that kind of stuff. If you have some breakthrough of why you disagree with the CDC, with the WHO, with Harvard Health, please tell me why you disagree. But if you disagree because you said so, that’s where things get problematic.

Like, I’ll give you the simplest of examples. There’s a very famous clip that I reacted to on my podcast where Gary Brecka says, “If you have headaches, it’s because you’re low on pink Himalayan sea salt.” How many reasons do you think people get headaches?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Many reasons.

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: You’re not even. You’re not even a doctor, right? No, I’m not.

STEVEN BARTLETT: My brother has. My brother has had chronic headaches since he was a. Since he was a kid.

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: You got a concussion, you have stress, you have a hormone issue, you have a tumor. There’s so many. You have migraines, you have a neck cramp. The possibilities are endless, right? To have the confidence to say, “This is what you’re missing. Everything else almost doesn’t matter.” The confidence is the misinformation.

Like, notice every time you asked me a question today, it was either “I don’t know,” “it depends,” “nuance for who.” It’s almost annoying because I can never give a clear answer. But that’s what science is, and that’s actually why people have lost trust in science, because we’re not as confident as Gary Brecka when he talks about salt for headaches.

Changing Medical Advice and Trust

STEVEN BARTLETT: Sometimes you’ve been wrong, right?

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: Of course.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Sometimes you’ve. I remember reading something where you said, “I admit that I change. I’ve changed my mindset when presented with new information, and I’ve explained why.” I think when we think about doctors, this is the part I think that some people struggle with, is if you look over the course of sort of 10, 20, 30, 40 years, some of the things we were told were healthy back then are no longer healthy, and new information comes about. I’m well aware that this is a scientific model, but I’m. Counterargument.

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: Put yourself in that shoe. In that seat. Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How do we know who to trust when doctors say that they’ve been wrong and they’ve changed their mind on really critical things before? And even, you know, when we think about vaccine disinformation.

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: Right.

STEVEN BARTLETT: A lot of the arguments you’ll get from the right are that you said this and now look what happened. So we’ll never trust you again. How do we navigate and know who to believe? Even doctors, when doctors will say, “Information I gave you in the past was actually no longer true.”

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: You have to take the hard route and do the work to find out why they said what they said then and why they’re changing their mind now.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So I’ll give you an example.

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: Yep.

The Pharmaceutical Industry and Trust

STEVEN BARTLETT: Actually, maybe this isn’t a doctor, this is studies. I remember having a guest on my podcast that talked about, I think there was a bit of a crisis with depression drugs in the early years where they had, because of the way that the tests had been done by the big pharmaceutical companies, the CEO of the pharmaceutical company knew that the depression drug did not work and had all of these side effects, but they pushed it through.

Even though the vast majority of the studies hadn’t shown that the drug worked. They found one study that had. They pushed it through, got to market, loads of kids used it, and then I think a decade later, again, I’m paraphrasing here. I’ll link what I’m talking about below. It was discovered that the CEO of that company knew it didn’t work, but there was a study and research that got it to market and people started using it.

And I think Johann Hari, who’s been on my podcast before, he was the Ozempic episode we released, he was one of the people as a young man that started taking that depression drug, only to find out that five, six years, seven, eight years later, it didn’t work. And the CEO knew that it wasn’t really working. So that was trust in the medical system, that was trust in research, that was trust in big Pharma. Much of the counter movement we’re seeing now is we think big Pharma is corrupt and we think they’re meddling with doctors to get drugs into market that maybe don’t work.

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: There’s a lot of drugs on the market. Agree.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.

The Self-Correcting Nature of Science

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: If science is so problematic and we shouldn’t trust for all those reasons, why is it the one example that we’re stretching to find of the mistake that was happened or the fraud that happened with this one drug? We’re talking about something that happened decades ago. It does happen. Fraud happens. It happens in healthcare. It happens with policing, it happens politicians. There is fraud. But pointing to that one episode and saying we should throw the whole field away is going to cause a loss for us.

And there are issues with pharma. There’s huge issues with pharma. I frequently talk about, even from like the pricing standpoint of pharma, how problematic they are. We’ve seen the issues with the opioid epidemic, how that was driven largely by pharma, but we’re calling them out.

The beauty of western medicine, of what we do here, is that we are the best at calling ourselves out on our failures. But actually the more we call ourselves out on our failures, the more trust we’ve lost. And in fact, when someone owes up to their failures and seeks to learn from them and seeks to make changes, that’s the person you want to follow. The person who is not confident, who is open to be transparent, who explains why these things are happening without 100% confidence. That’s the people that are giving you advice. That’s true.

The same way that we said earlier that everything was all natural does not mean it’s all good. Everything for profit is not necessarily evil. My YouTube channel is for profit. I make a very healthy living doing what I’m doing. Doesn’t mean it’s evil. So while it’s easy to make shortcuts and overgeneralize, we have to talk about specific instances and call balls and strikes as they are umpires make mistakes. Healthcare industry has made mistakes. There’s been vaccine incidents in the past that have hurt people. We’ve learned from them. We called it out, we’ve studied it. There are doctors constantly studying where we need to do better. This is ongoing at all times.

And the ironic part is most people have no idea that it’s happening because we only find out about it on issues we’re passionate about. I recently did a video or I was on a podcast where I was asked about birth control. I gave a very simple answer. It was non motivated in any way. It was just kind of presenting the information as it was. There were a lot of very mean comments in that information about how birth control can potentially be harming people that I don’t believe the negative side effects that can come with it. All these statements that were being made and I found them to not be true, I had to do like a little soul searching to see if they were true because I do that with all the negative comments and I said no.

Birth control can have side effects just like with any medication. The reason why birth control may be is being brought up is because this is a topic people are very passionate about. This is a topic where doctors have discriminated in the past about. So it’s a bit more triggering to the emotional part of our brains. But if we look at what’s leading hospitalizations from a drug in the United States, Tylenol, you don’t see anyone uproar making YouTube videos that Tylenol is problematic. Where’s Tylenol Acetaminophen. Paracetamol for you.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Paracetamol, yeah.

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: The amount of hospitalizations for Tylenol induced liver failure is sky high. I’m sure we could pop up the statistics on screen, but no one gets upset about Tylenol because it’s not emotionally triggering. And that is true for all of healthcare. There’s side effects to taking medications. So it’s easy to only focus on one part of that equation and say, “Well, doctors used to say this. What about this? Why did doctors say it?” What got them to say it there? And the idea of us getting it perfect, never going to be true. We’re always working with incomplete information. All of medicine is just our best guess.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How many of you started thinking about your long term health when you hit 30? For me, this was a wake up moment of me thinking to myself, okay, I probably need to start paying a little bit more attention now. I already felt a change in myself when I hit 30 with things like myself, my metabolism, my energy levels. So this year is no different. Zoe, which is a company I’ve invested in, but also a company that are a sponsor of this podcast, helps me to make smarter food choices. All based on their world leading science and my own test results. If I’m ordering food, I know how to make my takeaway so much smarter. By adding things like a side of vegetables to eat first or choosing the option with the most fiber, Zoe helps me to make that choice. It guides me and coaches me. It’s my personalized nutrition coach that I have on me 24, 7. And to help you start your Zoe journey and start making smarter food choices, I’m giving you guys 10% off when you join Zoe. Now all you’ve got to do is use code CEO10 at the checkout when you sign up. Enjoy and let me know how you get on.

Animal Studies in Research

What about these animal studies? A lot of the research that’s presented from experts is from animal studies, rats and things like that.

The Reality of Medical Research and Development

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: Yeah. So that’s where people like to skip steps. The amount. So pharma is out for money, right? That’s fair to say. That’s their job. They’re trying to create a return for their stockholders. They try and pick research to do that hopefully will drive the best profits.

99% of the stuff that they start researching on from the initial promise of animal studies, 99% of it fails and they’re only picking the top. Then you go one step further. Once it works in animal studies, in petri dishes, and then it goes into human trials. Another 99% of it fails.

So the idea that something has mechanistic value, then works in a petri dish, then it works in an animal model. For it to make all those steps is so astronomically rare that it ends up working for the general population. The fact is that we shouldn’t jump to from animal model to human, because 99% of that is going to fail.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So what are we saying then? Do we have to go back to just living like our ancestors lived? Because you said earlier on that the world we live in has never been more unnatural. So is the antidote for all of this stuff we’re talking about, is it to go back to being human and like we always say our ancestors were?

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: Well, I think what we need to look at is the evolution of humans and the anthropology aspect of it, because we can then better understand ourselves now and why we’re having problems with this unnatural world. Right.

So if you look at why anxiety was a survival benefit to us back then versus how it could be very problematic to us now in a safer world, studying prehistoric cavemen, humans would be beneficial, but drawing conclusions from their diets and potentially what they ate. Oh, man, you’re going to get into so many fallacies and biases that the information is not going to be great and not very applicable.

Redesigning Society for Better Health

STEVEN BARTLETT: If you could redesign society in such a way that it would be, in your mind, more healthier, more healthier for the average human, you have to start from zero. So you’re President of the United States. Trump doesn’t get it. Biden doesn’t get it, Dr. Mike gets it. And you could really rewire society. What are some of the sort of macro top line changes you would make? Okay, I’m taking, I’m going to keep everything on the table.

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: The first thing that I would do, and this is echoing one of the authors and experts I really enjoy listening to, and he’s actually coming on my podcast soon. Jonathan Haidt. I would get phones out of schools.

I think that much in the same way that we regulate addictive substances like cigarettes, like vaping, like alcohol to those of age, we need to start thinking about that for social media. And that’s an unpopular thing to say. But I think if you really look at it, there’s a lot of problems that can come from it. Very limited benefit for someone who’s 13 to be looking at those images. So I think some major changes need to be made in schools.

Personal Life and Professional Balance

STEVEN BARTLETT: You were voted in 2015. You know, that’s a long time ago. Ten years ago, in 2015, you were named People magazine’s sexiest doctor Alive.

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: I don’t think I was voted. I think they just nominated me.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Well, it is something, right? Yeah, it is what it is. Your relationships. What’s your relationship status if you’re able to share it?

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: Relationships have been really tricky. As a medical provider, you have to carry yourself with an air of professionalism. You have to make people feel comfortable in talking to you about very sensitive subjects.

So I’ve been very careful to balance the world of showing my personal life to some degree and showing people and reminding them that I’m human. I, too, have relationships. I, too, play sports. I have a family, I have dogs. But also not do it so much that it actually can cause harm in my clinical interactions.

So initially, when I started social media, I was very open about my relationships, who I was dating, what my relationship status was, and I thought that I was under the firm belief that there is no way this could be detrimental. And much in the same way that I thought that reading every negative comment can only be helpful. Boy, was I proven wrong. Not only does it cause harm to potentially the clinical interactions, it can cause harm with my audience online. Not dating patients. That’s not what I mean.

STEVEN BARTLETT: No, no, no. Just a clinical interactions piece.

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: I mean, well, you know, if a patient is wondering who you’re dating or what you’re dating, that’s going to derail the conversation away from health. The same way that it would derail the conversation from social media, from people listening to medical talking points, to then talking about personal life.

So before, while I was being very open with it, now I’ve kind of said my personal life to some degree is my personal life. When I begin sharing, everyone will know about it because it’ll be everywhere. But now I tend to become a little bit more. I have some things from my personal life, but the majority of it is an open book.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I was curious about your relationship status because as someone who’s so busy and a content creator and going through all of the things we described earlier with your mental health and the feedback and all of that.

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: Sure.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How you manage to be successful in that realm as well.

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: Yeah. So, in doing what I do, I feel like I’m very busy because I’m involved in so many different things, But I feel like everyone’s busy. You know, you make time for what you’re passionate about.

So there was a period of time I was single for a few years, Then I got into relationships that got out of relationships. And it really is. If you meet the right person and you want to dedicate your time to them, you’ll sacrifice something.

You know, before I used to be all about watching sports, like that was my nighttime routine. Now I can’t even tell you the last time I watched a sporting event. I’d just been so busy, like maybe the Ryan Garcia fight boxing match. But I don’t have the time for it because I’ve made sacrifices to do other things I’m passionate about.

And I think if your partner consistently, I think this is something I said before, that if your partner consistently says they don’t have time, no matter how busy they are, you need to do a little evaluation and see is that something that they truly want or at least bring up that conversation.

Deep Thinking and Self-Reflection

STEVEN BARTLETT: You’re someone that strikes me as being quite philosophical and deep thinking in their downtime and probably spends a lot of time thinking about bigger questions about life, meaning, purpose and all of those things. Is that a accurate and balance? What are those big things that you’re considering in your mind?

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: It’s accurate but not big picture, big philosophical questions. It’s more I’m deep thinking from an introspective standpoint of running back every day. What could I have done better? What can I improve on? What should I think about for the future? How can I grow from today?

So I spend a lot of time doing that, and that’s not something I taught myself to do when I was a kid. I remember this very vividly in high school, age 13, being very awkward freshman year of high school, talking to girls in my class and then coming home and sleeping in my bed. And as I’m going to sleep thinking, “oh my God, what should I have said to look cool? Maybe I should have just stayed quiet like those cool guys in the movies” and playing back those scenarios throughout the day.

And while that was silly when I was 13, now as a doctor, I play back my patient encounters and think about what I could do better in that communication sense. I play back my podcast interviews in my head and think about what I could do better. So I’m constantly thinking about that, and again, not by choice. It’s just kind of happening in my mind.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And that’s where the anxiety stems from.

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: I guess the anxiety can creep up there if you feel like you’re not improving or your progress is stagnating. Like the idea that I told you I wasn’t exercising a lot. I start ruminating and thinking, “oh my God, you haven’t been exercising in so long now you’re going to not be healthy. What if People online start thinking that, oh, that’s not a healthy thing to do” and you could start catastrophizing very easy. This is what our human minds do.

And that’s why CBT, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, one of the more popular forms of evidence based therapy, is taking those cognitive distortions, those catastrophized black or white labeling thoughts and just talking back to them, saying, “how true is that? That if you had all as on your tests and then you got one C, that you’re a failure? How true is it that if you don’t exercise for three months, that means you’re an out of shape slob” and you have to talk back to them? So doctors are not immune to cognitive distortions.

Dealing with Life and Death in Medicine

STEVEN BARTLETT: I always wonder with doctors, when you’re dealing with people’s health and their outcomes, which sometimes are positive and sometimes not positive, how that can sit on your shoulders and how you can take that home with you because you must deal with a lot of people that are no longer here.

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: Yeah, for sure. Especially when I would be a resident working in the ICU where an intensive care unit patients are the sickest, so more likely for them to lose their lives. You’re having conversations with family members about discontinuing CPR, about signing certain papers to say that we’re not going to give more medical care, we’re only going to focus on comfort as opposed to treatment.

And those conversations are not easy conversations. And the way that I’ve approached them is with unbiased truth. Just here’s what I know. I want you to know what I know. I’m explaining to you why I think what I think. Now you tell me what you’d like to do.

And ultimately it gives patients a sense of responsibility in a good way, where it empowers them or empowers their family members to make the right choice. And the right choice is not clear. Two people can make different choices and they both be right choices. Same thing with healthcare. Healthcare is as much art as it is a science. So two doctors can see the same patient and recommend two different treatments and not be wrong.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Was there a hardest day? When you think back over your medical career, was there a hardest day in your practice?

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: No, nothing that specifically jumps out. I think it’s how it wears on you from a perspective of just length of the amount of administrative work you have to do, the amount of time you want to spend with the patient versus what you’re given.

The ability of helplessness where you can’t fully help a patient no matter how much you want to. When you know, if a patient does a specific treatment, you know they’ll get better, but they’re not interested in it or are being deceived or influenced in a way where they’re not going down the right path.

Those really, really drain me because I think about those at night of how can I be more effective so I can help my patient come to the right conclusion, or at least help them make a decision that is actually actively not detrimental to their health.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Your mission at the moment to really help, to myth bust and call out disinformation as it relates to health care and advice, is that driven in part because as a doctor, you’re seeing the consequences firsthand of information your patients are bringing to you that is patently false or untrue or doesn’t, isn’t, quote, unquote proven. And then you’re basically arguing with them about that or something. Is that where it comes from?

The Power of Social Media in Medicine

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: Yeah. That’s why I started social media, because I was having a very similar conversation with the 30 patients that I saw in a day, and I was like, “Wow, I got to tell the world this so they can all know this information, so that they all don’t fall victim to these scams where they think, ‘Doctor, I had $100 this month to spend on my health. And I bought this thing. I bought these two smoothies, and I thought, this is the answer. This is going to help me, right? This says it helps with cancer.'” And that’s not the answer.

And in having those conversations over and over again, it’s what drove the passion to being on social media. And now I think about medicine differently than I did when I first started. I used to think medicine is doctor and patient. Now I view it more in a public health sense where my impact on social media goes so much further than patient interactions or viewer interactions, where now I can influence policy.

A Life-Saving Emergency at 30,000 Feet

Had a medical emergency on a flight, and they made that call, “Is there a doctor on board?” And I was faced with the moment, like, “Okay, do I volunteer? Do I just stay quiet? I don’t know what to do,” but I volunteered. And it turned out after some investigation, that a young gentleman was going into anaphylactic shock. His throat was closing up due to an allergy, and I wasn’t worried. I said, “Where’s your EpiPen?” And he said, “I don’t have one. I didn’t even know I had this allergy.”

So I asked the pilot, “Can we land?” Pilot says, “Well, it’s an hour and a half back to Canada. And an hour to Portugal, some island in Portugal.” That’s not enough time. His throat’s closing. He’s going to die in five minutes. So I’m like, “What can I do?”

So I opened the plane’s emergency kit, thinking there’s going to be some epinephrine in there or an EpiPen, and there’s no EpiPen, and I’m like, “Okay, what do I do now?” There’s no Internet when you’re over the Atlantic Ocean, so there’s nothing to Google but finding that there is epinephrine, which is the same medicine that is found in EpiPen in a different formulation, in a different dosage for a cardiac arrest.

So when someone’s heart stops, we also give the same medicine if they’re flatlined, if they have a specific rhythm to try and restart the heart. So it’s a much thicker needle, much longer, not those cute little EpiPen needles that just go into the side of your thigh. And I said, “Okay, well, I need to do some rough calculations here and just guesstimate here, because otherwise he’s going to lose his life.”

And right there in the first class cabin, we take off his pants, we inject them with this huge needle. He’s screaming. There’s a little bit of blood coming out. I inject the medicine. I’m praying that it’s working, and fast forward that story. I stayed with him for eight hours for the rest of that flight until he landed. We didn’t need to divert. I checked his blood pressure and pulse every 15 to 30 minutes, and we saved his life.

From Viral Story to Policy Change

And you think that would be the end of it? You’re like, “Look at that. I did my doctor job and that’s it.” But I went and told that story on YouTube. Got almost 10 million views, if not more. Now I don’t know what it’s at. And the Senate Majority leader, Chuck Schumer, calls from his office or his office calls and says, “Hey, I’d like to get EpiPens on planes. Can you stand with us and tell us your story to the media?”

Yes, we tell the story. We call on the FAA to make these changes. And now 70% of planes, I don’t know what the exact number is, but something like 70% of planes have EpiPens on board where that will never have to happen again.

STEVEN BARTLETT: That’s incredible.

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: And that’s the power of social media that people don’t talk about. That’s public health. That’s helping people that aren’t even needing the help yet. So that’s the kind of medicine I like to think about now.

Learning CPR: A Life-Saving Skill

STEVEN BARTLETT: Well, you have a half a body lying over there in the corner. So in the sake of helping people using social media, I asked you if you could bring a… I don’t even know what to call that. It looks like a half a mannequin or something.

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: Yeah, mannequin.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, it’s a mannequin. Because early in my life I got told that learning the skill of CPR is one of the sort of simplest, potentially life saving things that I could learn, because you never know. And I’ve got people in my family that died of various cardiovascular related conditions, heart attacks and things like that. And so I would love to learn again. This is probably not an official certification.

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: This is artificial certification.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Learn the basics of CPR and how to keep someone alive in such a situation. Jack, could you bring the… What should we call him? We’ll call him half Mike.

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: Yeah, we’ll call him Baby Mike. So I’m curious, before we do any kind of instruction on it, what do you know thus far about CPR? And all wrong answers are acceptable here.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You push on the chest roughly around the top of the rib cage, and then you blow into the mouth and you just do that over and over again until they come back to life.

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: Okay. Do you know what the reason of doing CPR is?

STEVEN BARTLETT: That’s a very good question, and it’s…

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: Not a trick question. I’m just genuinely curious because I like to know where we’re starting. And no one knows this, by the way. This is why I do what I do. So this is not…

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s something to do with keeping oxygen flowing around the body through the blood.

Understanding the Purpose of CPR

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: You’re right on target. Okay, so the purpose of CPR is if you find someone who’s unconscious, not breathing, is pulseless, that means their heart’s not beating. That means clinically they’re dead. So anything you do here can only potentially help. Can’t hurt. Right, because the person’s already dead.

So by doing proper CPR, what you’re doing is you’re compressing the chest, chest compressions to squeeze the heart, which has some blood in it, to circulate the blood throughout the body that still has some residual oxygen in it to deliver oxygen to the vital organs. So you’re not actually saving someone’s life by doing CPR. You’re buying them time. The purpose of doing CPR is to allow time for first responders to arrive to then give advanced cardiac life support.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh, okay.

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: And that’s why the first step of doing CPR has nothing to do with the person and has everything to do with calling for help.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, so I called the first responders or…

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: Because that would… So ideally, you never want to do anything that will distract you from starting chest compressions, because the faster you can get to doing chest compressions, the better your outcomes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do I tell someone else to call?

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: Ideally, if you’re alone, obviously that’s not happening. But you can’t just say out into the open, “Hey, someone call 911.” Because what happens? Everyone assumes the other person calls. No one calls. This happened with many medical emergencies, and it’s terrible when it happens. There’s actually criminal cases about that. Someone screaming for help, and everyone assuming the other neighbor would call, and then no one ends up calling.

So you have to say, “Hey, you in the blue shirt, you in the pink hat. You call 911,” and they will call 911. And you immediately start pushing hard and fast in the center of the chest, one hand on top of the other.

Proper CPR Technique

STEVEN BARTLETT: When you say center of the chest, you mean in between the pecs?

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: Correct.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, so right in between the pecs. One hand on top of the other.

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: On top of the other.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And what if I break a rib?

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: The person’s dead.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So I can go as hard as I want to go.

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: You want to go 2 inches deep, which means pretty hard, because in order to compress the heart, you need to go 2 inches deep. And 2 inches deep is pretty… 5 centimeters deep. So one hand on top of the other, pushing hard and fast in the center of the chest, in between the pecs. And you’re doing that until help arrives.

Okay. So you see how you’re much like most people who are in really good shape. You’re using your triceps. Try doing that for more than two minutes. You will fade no matter what good shape you’re in. In fact, when we’re in the hospitals, the way that we do this is maximum two minutes at a time. And then we tap out and get the next person in because it’s so tiring. The way to… max full body weight. Correct. And you hear the click. That means you’re doing it to the correct depth. And that way you will get less tired, and you’ll be able to do that for longer periods of time.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So that click means I’m hitting the heart for this little device. Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I had to go down a long way away. I had to go down so far that I would never have naturally done that to somebody. I would have thought that I was going to do more damage.

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: Correct. And because of that fear that people have, we unfortunately have worse outcomes with people who have cardiac arrest in the field. And in fact, most cardiac arrests, meaning heart stopping, happen not in hospital settings. They happen in community settings. They happen on the street at dinners with our loved ones.

And the important point to remember here, this isn’t what you do for someone who’s talking and is having a heart attack. This is for cardiac arrest. They’re not talking, they’re not moving, they’re not breathing. Because if they’re talking, that means they have a pulse. Because I’ve seen in some videos online, someone’s trying to talk or moving around, and people are doing chest compression. I’m like, “No, stop.”

STEVEN BARTLETT: Please do chest compression.

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: But if they’re pulseless, if they’re not breathing, they’re unconscious. Start hands only CPR. After calling for help.

The Reality of CPR Pressure

STEVEN BARTLETT: I can’t… I really want to emphasize how hard I had to push down then. It wasn’t just pushing on the surface. I had to put all my weight and shove down on the chest.

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: And you know that insecurity about the amount of pressure that you were talking about. There’s even worse outcomes for women who have a cardiac arrest because people are afraid of pushing in between breasts. If the person’s life can be saved when first responders arrive because you bought them time, do it. It’s not fair that women are less likely to receive CPR from bystanders because of their bodies.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I thought, because I think again, because I’ve watched so many movies, that when you start doing the CPR, the person comes back to life.

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: It can happen.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay. Because I thought that’s what you were doing. I thought you were bringing them back to life.

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: That’s the notion that some people have. And that’s why I wanted to make sure that you’re not actually bringing them back to life. You’re buying them time and circulating the residual oxygen so that help can arrive to try and restart the heart.

Duration and Decision-Making in CPR

STEVEN BARTLETT: How long do you have to do… What’s the longest you’ve had to do CPR on someone for, and then they’ve ended up surviving?

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: I’ve been in double digits before for young patients, because young patients we will… If you have a patient who’s elderly, who’s in the ICU who’s already very sick when their heart stops, the odds are that you’ll bring them back are obviously very low. But even if you will bring them back to life, they’re going to be in a worse quality of life than they already were.

So many times we actually have a conversation as the CPR is ongoing, with the families explaining that and saying that this is not beneficial, that even if we bring them back, they might be in a worse state and that we don’t recommend it. And we actually have scores and guidelines that we can discuss with patients about statistics on this.

But when someone’s very young, let’s say you have a 20 year old who has an unusual cardiac arrest, we would fight much longer because they have an opportunity to heal once we bring them back. So it’s very dependent on a specific situation.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And you had to have that exact same conversation when someone was operating when treating your mother?

Dealing with Medical Trauma and Loss

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: Yep, that was the conversation. That was my first interaction with that kind of environment. I actually remember when I was in the room and the alarms were going off and the residents or the doctors were doing CPR and I called it off.

I remember the next time I heard those alarms was during my training in a patient simulation lab. And that was like the first moment I ever had a flashback where a sound brought back a feeling, where that sound of those alarms brought me back to how I felt and how uncomfortable I felt. I’ve never felt that before.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You must have heard that sound a lot since then.

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: Oh yeah. And I’ve had some difficult conversations with my fellow colleagues because of it. I remember very vividly when my mom passed away. We were in the waiting room waiting for documentation forms to sign. And I came out to check and see if they’re finishing up.

And some of the nurses and doctors, I don’t even know what medical professionals they were, they were kind of laughing in their little work area in the back, not where they were patient facing. But hearing those laughs got me so angry. How could anyone laugh during a time like this?

But then I had to remind myself, these are people too. These are people who are losing patients every day. And if they took the loss the way that I’m taking this loss, they wouldn’t last. They wouldn’t be able to help my mom or other moms. So I had to remind myself about that.

But what my takeaway from it was when I saw co-residents of mine maybe writing their notes after someone’s family passed away. And I see the family in earshot and they’re talking about their day, or they’re laughing or they’re giggling or saying some kind of joke not related to the situation, I just, I don’t correct them. That’s not my place to do. I just share my story of how I felt, and I thought it created a really good learning opportunity.

Reflecting on Missed Opportunities

STEVEN BARTLETT: Dr. Mike, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they’re leaving it for. If you could go back to a pivotal moment in your life and make a different decision, what would that moment be and why?

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: I think about the social isolation and loneliness that you described that I felt when I lost my mom and how I isolated myself from my classmates to this day, out of 300 students in my class or so, I didn’t make a lot of friends, in fact, any friends, and I was not involved. I was fully disconnected from my class.

And I think it’s because of what I was going through at that time. And I wish that I either reached out for support from the school or created conversations amongst my classmates because the friendships that they’ve created have lasted to now. This is over a decade. People got married in those classes. They’ve created lifelong friends.

And I feel like because I moved away and I was two hours away from the school, I wasn’t a part of it. And I feel like that has significantly impacted the number of friendships I carry to this day, that the friends that I do have are my close friends from high school, maybe some from college, but almost none from medical school. And I feel like that’s a really, really big missed opportunity.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you feel lonely?

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: Yeah, sometimes, for sure. But I think that’s a byproduct of society these days, and my work adds to that as well.

Making Medical Information Accessible

STEVEN BARTLETT: Dr. Mike, thank you so much. Thank you for all of the work you do and the way you do it. You’re one of the most accessible voices on the Internet as it relates to medical information. And I say accessible intently because sometimes doctors can be a little bit exclusive. They’re too smart, and they don’t really let us in.

But I think you’re both confronting disinformation in a really honest, fair, balanced way. But at the same time, you’re providing information in such an accessible way, and you’ve drawn a tremendous audience to you across YouTube and your podcast and across your socials and everywhere else.

And there’s no doubt in my mind that you’ve not just saving the lives in your practice every day, but you’re saving hundreds of thousands of lives you’ll never meet, but also you’re improving so many lives because you’re helping us to navigate towards better information or a better way to think about the information we receive.

And I’m on that journey, too. I’m doing my very best to try and navigate that. And as someone that sits here with a lot of experts, which is your lowest criteria of acceptable evidence experts and medical practitioners, and I’m doing this two, three times a week sometimes. There’s often conflicting information.

I always struggle with how to present that information, because on one hand, you don’t want to censor people because that assumes that I know what’s right. But on the other hand, you feel a sense of responsibility that the platform you’re creating is not doing any harm. And I think that’s the first kind of principle of anyone that’s trying to produce content is do no harm.

So, Mike, you’re a prime example of someone that I see doing no harm and a lot of good in the world. So thank you so much.

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: I very much appreciate you saying that. It means a lot. You know, a lot of days, me and my team, my small team will sit in front of the camera and talk and forget the implications and the outcomes that we can make in the world with the content that we make. So that’s what continually drives us by reminders like what you just said. So I appreciate you saying that.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Please keep going. I know it’s difficult sometimes, and I know people do very vicious. I’ve been on the receiving end of that for much of my life. But I think you know that. I don’t have to tell you this, but you know that the net impact of your mission is so unbelievable. It’s so unbelievable, you’ll never see it.

You’ll never meet the people, the families, the father, the mother, the grandfather. But I just wish you could, because I think if you could see the net impact, it would put all of that stuff in perspective where it should be. So, Mike, thank you.

DR MIKE VARSHAVSKI: Thank you. Appreciate you having me.

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