84. Progress Note #5: Crack the Code on Health Misinformation on Social Media

Hello everyone, I'm Dr. Darsha, and I'm Dr. Altamash Raja, and welcome to Medicine Redefined. A podcast where we will explore the often overlooked but necessary components of health, what we consider to be the fundamentals. We will investigate topics and practices that can give you and your patients the best chance to optimize a healthy lifestyle. It's time to move the needle forward and put the health back in healthcare. Welcome to an episode of the Progress Note. In Medicine, the Progress Note is a medical record that documents a patient's clinical status or achievements during their care. It typically consists of four components. The subject of data, the objective data, the assessment, and lastly the plan. It essentially is a systematic review in a point of time. Other goals with these episodes are to highlight mainstream practices, take a deeper dive, and approach polarized topics with nuance. While advancement is always happening in medicine, rethinking data, as well as our beliefs, is a rare occurrence. Join us as we continue to make progress, hold ourselves accountable, and redefine medicine. All right, man. PN5. How you doing? Good, dude. I'm doing all right. How are you? Good, and for those who don't know, PN stands for Progress Note. I figure at this point we can probably start abbreviating, and those who are listening and following along are pretty straightforward. I'm doing well. I'm doing well. Pretty gloomy day today, so it's just kind of feeling tired. For those who don't know in the East Coast, it's been freezing rain, and winter is, I guess it's not even the colds there of the year yet, but there we are, ready to move to the West Coast, or Southeast, or whenever the time comes up. I was hoping it would snow today, so at least feel like the holiday spirit, because for some reason, this winter, I'm just not getting that Christmas new year arrived. It's not the holiday season for me yet, so I don't know, hopefully next week we got some snow or something. Yeah. Are you sure you're a big Christmas day snow guy, like, is that kind of made you so cool? It would be cool to have it. I mean, I celebrate, psychologically, Mira's birthday is Christmas Eve. So typically, combining it, family and stuff, but honestly, her birthday doesn't even like her birthday on Christmas Eve, but everything's closed. So it's kind of annoying, which is why it's nice to take a trip to Central America, South America, where they do Christmas pretty big there, like bigger than we do in the States. So it should be fun. Excellent. Okay, well, hopefully this year will be good. So today, we have an interesting topic, man. I think this is going to be coming out just right before 2023, and we have been talking about this for quite some time just to give people a little bit of background. And what we're going to talk about is just essentially navigating social media, really any and all platforms, because what we found for ourselves personally, but also people who come to us is that more and more people are getting their information and really their primary point of information to social media, whether it's Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and really not as much anymore, really Twitter and Instagram. And that's where we get the breaking news, that's where we get everything. And so sometimes that's the only place we get the information. And inherently with that, there's a challenge, right, because dare I say people are too lazy to verify information often, and I've been guilty of this. And then so, you know, you get to thinking that maybe the truth are those are the facts and especially in the world of health and wellness and fitness where really people can see anything, because they think that they have a platform, it can become quite challenging. And so our hope is today to be able to give some general guidelines, some overviews and maybe highlight our process on how we go ahead and navigate that and the cloudy place that that is, yeah, anything to add on to that, you think? Yeah, I think that's a great start, I think that's exactly what we're going to talk about. And it's funny, you know, this is the point of why we started PN or progress node, right? It was the kind of break myths that we're finding on social media and then providing evidence for the data and talking about how we kind of formulate our hypotheses and our action plan. So maybe we should have started the whole progress node with this episode, like the whole series, because this I think would be a good segue for people to listen and learn and understand not only just who, like, like, content creators, but also just the movement behind social media and the movement behind information being gathered from social media, because it is really at a rapid rate and we're all, all of our minds are getting, you know, shifted, we're getting mindset shifts without even realizing, because everything is happening so rapidly and then we're forced to kind of adapt to whatever's in front of us, whatever's in front of the screen. So yeah, I'm excited for this. Yeah, that's actually an interesting point to bring up is as many reels as people end up just mildly screwing through, sometimes you don't appreciate how that's having and subconscious influence and then maybe our actions are biased towards that, of course, you turn this into a philosophical thing, I don't want you, of course. And I'm happy to weave in and out of that, any type of philosophical ideas back forth, but maybe to give people some guidelines of, you know, just your perspective. I'm curious to see you have been doing this a lot longer than I have, you're much better at it. And I think you're very savvy in terms of what we talk about offline, in terms of staying away from things and not being bound to it, right, not getting trapped by, what's that Netflix documentary that is at the social dilemma? No, that's social. Social is the movie. Yeah, the social dilemma. Yeah, I think it is social. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's kind of talks about, right, people going through the reward pathway and the algorithms and how they affect people and essentially being trapped. So what's kind of your approach, how long have you been doing this, maybe give people some background and what the, where are you most active and kind of how do you approach social media in general? Yeah, so, you know, started as, I always had the social media is, right, like, friends through Facebook, just like everyone else did. I really haven't changed into, turned into a content creator until 2017, like my third year of med school, 2018, where I started posting more on Instagram because I started to realize like, hey, people were using my philosophy or my blogs as kind of inspiration and wanted to hear more from me. After about a year or two, I think it was around, you know, 2018, 2019, right before COVID, when everyone was kind of on lockdown, you just started seeing this term med, med fluencer get thrown around, which is a medical influencer. And medical doctors, you know, as we typically go through our stages, we look for prestige, right? It's like one of our inherent traits, especially our generation, is that we're looking for popularity in a way. We're looking for validation, especially as you go through a lot of this hard work. And so, to be a mentor in the field or to be someone who is a spokesperson can look really good. And so I think a lot of people went down this med fluencer route and started just spewing out information, their life, their journey, a day in the life of a 30 year med student, so to speak, right? And Dr. Mike was kind of the first one to trailblaze that. And so everyone kind of looked up to him to say, oh, man, how'd he get up there? How do I start to achieve that as well? So I was really heavy on Instagram. And now, you know, Twitter kind of was always there, but Twitter was always so toxic that I stayed away from it. But then, you know, when I thought about social media, I didn't want to get so caught up in it. I started to realize like, hey, followers don't matter because eventually this is going to become so saturated that anyone can find you. It's not about the number of followers. It's about what you're putting out there because everybody's going to have a social media at that point, right? And in 2016, 2017, that wasn't true. You weren't seeing 40, 56 year olds on social media. You weren't really seeing the younger generation on it either. It was really this niche population. And so I started thinking like about that and saying, okay, well, it doesn't matter about the followers. So if that doesn't matter, then what does? And that's where I started realizing networking is really big to advance your career. And to using it as a way to find research or using it as a way to find news, research articles, anything that I wanted to learn. And then third, it was a great way to motivate, inspire, and hold myself accountable. So that was kind of the three things that I started to use Instagram for. And then I loathe as, I'll just finish off this quote real quick. He always said, don't use social media, don't let social media use you. And from there, that was like, it clicked and I was like, okay, I got it. Yeah, that's brilliant. Yeah, that's exactly the stuff that I think I've been guilty of sometimes to just let it use me. I want to, you know, we've talked often about, and you've mentioned that Twitter is toxic and I've heard a lot of people that I listened to say, dog, Twitter, so workplace, which is, I don't know why. What is it about Twitter exclusively that makes it quote unquote toxic, whereas Instagram or TikTok is not? Yeah, I think it's, it's quick fleeting, right? So you don't have to have a profile picture, your username has nothing to do about you. So you essentially can just become a troll, right? And that's where the word troll kind of came around the internet as somebody who would go spew some hate comment and then leave and go somewhere else to do the same thing. And with Twitter, it kind of gets so lost, right? And there, it seems like their only intention is to just make a remark that's the opposite to hurt somebody, commit a little bit of disgust. And then that's it. They, they just feel like they're getting something out, but to the other person on the receiving end could be like, damn, why they say that? And they're going to contemplate on that. But I think with Twitter, it's so easy because there's so many different topics on your screen at once. You can see two to three Twitter threats, right? Like almost at a time, whereas Instagram and other things, there's more intention behind it. You really have to sit with the post. Right. Sounds fleeting. You got to scroll. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Now, um, is the, the character limit still a thing on Twitter? It is. I think they increase the by a little bit, but yeah, they're still definitely 140 or some, some sort of character limit. Yeah. So there's another thing we're, what we're going to touch on in terms of context into once that we often emphasize that's, there's not much opportunity to provide that. Unless people do multiple threads and then, you know, you got to scroll and read and got the bit. Um, that's what's really interesting about what you said, the whole influencer and met influencer thing is a recent phenomenon only two years ago. I didn't think that. I think, you know, because I was late to the game, I thought that everybody was doing this for a long, long time, and especially knowing that Twitter, what, 2011 is when it first started. Maybe sooner than that. Can maybe. And so, you know, I just thought that it was very, very popular, but so let's, let's maybe think about, well, actually before I say that what makes sense to me is why that's the place people prefer to get their research, right? Something that you pointed out. When I think about research, because again, I'm in academics and we have been in training for a long time, we think about health and, and fitness and nutrition and sleep and, um, orthopod logics and pain and all these things that we routinely talk about, you know, the information that we want to get from is the primary literature, right? And that's research articles, that's published peer-reviewed studies, et cetera, et cetera, books. Um, those are all pretty boring places to, to get information from. These aren't like a good read, a fiction novel, like Harry Potter or something like that, right? So you really have to, and sometimes they're very, very dense and they're written by academics who, um, again, they're not trying to capture you in any way whatsoever. And there aren't pictorials. And so, you know, getting a nice video or real to get somebody in or thumbnail as, you know, Brian talked about before, um, that, that's an, that's an easy way to, to get somebody in and then they might read a little bit of post. So that makes sense to me, you know, especially as we've talked about the, the short attention spans and everything like that. But I suppose the challenge that people have is because everybody has a platform and anybody can make a post and anybody can share everything and everybody can be, quote, unquote, a content creator. Maybe even define what that means, content creator. Honestly, I feel like everyone's a content creator now, right? I think the original definition was somebody who was purposely making content with the intention of either making money or gaining followers, um, but there was a clear theme and audience behind that, whereas now what people are saying is we're all content creators. The way the world is going, again, a little bit of philosophy and whatever, it's Web 3.0. We're all going into the screen or lies going into the screen. So essentially we're all content creators, everything we create, everything we type, it's all content at this point that AI will eventually figure out who we are and, and make copies or whatever. Yeah. Absolutely. So how can someone who is maybe being introduced? And I think as a parent, uh, often parents will talk about this or think about, hey, when can we give our children, you know, these devices so they can navigate social media and how can we arm our children or somebody who's young and, you know, what's good information, what's bad information, but maybe specifically for the purposes of things that we talk about health and wellness and healthcare related, we can keep it focused to that, um, and then maybe we can branch out. What are, do you have some general outlines? How do you go about that filtering through the noise to get the signal essentially? I think that's tough. It's a very nuanced topic, right? I mean, a lot of us don't mind following a lot of people, whereas some of us want to keep our follower account low, and I'm on that ladder end because when you look at the algorithm, you want to follow people that you're going to be seeing more of, right? And the algorithms have even changed now to where you can follow 2,000 people on Instagram, let's say, but you'll probably still only see the same five or six people. So you have to be very intentional about what you want to see, otherwise the device and the platform is going to do it for you. So when I first started out, you know, I would kind of just follow everyone and anything, and see what kind of content they were producing, and at that time, there was good diversity. And you know, I would give it a week, I'd give it two weeks, I'd see with the type of content, and then I was never afraid to unfollow, I'd be like, nope, this is not for me, like I'm not getting any value out of this, so I'm going to unfollow up. Now what I have to do is, hmm, I haven't heard much about water or hydration recently. Let me go to Tracy Dues' profile and like two, three of her photos, because now the algorithm is going to sense that, and I'm going to get more information in the next couple days of Tracy, or hey, I haven't heard much of parenting or pediatrics. Let me go to Sherry Shoes profile, like a couple, and now it's going to start populating again. So now it's such a different game, because you have to be intentional in terms of what you want to see. And I still kind of have the same rules, I'll follow somebody, and now because there's a lot of collaborations, there's a lot of shit talking, if I can say, right, between creators saying, you know, this first thing, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, versus this, I'll go, I'll go to the book. There is a lot of that. Yeah, I have noticed that. There's more and more than much. And so I'll go, and I'll check them out, and I'll follow, because as we, I've learned at least from Giselle Ernie in her episode, she'll always try to follow the different opinions. And that's always something that's a little tough for me, which I'll touch on at the end, because I don't know, for me, it's just, it's so tough to believe people. And again, there's a lot of confirmation bias, right, there's a lot of confirmation bias with social media. But to keep it short, that's kind of my game plan, is that I'll follow, and then I'll unfollow, if I'm like, not really gaining anything out, new out of this, or any value out of this. I love that. What's interesting about that, and unique to me, is for you, it seems to be much more of an active process, right, like thinking about seeking out those things that you haven't seen. And so you're, you're so mindful about what is actually going through your feed, and you're like, oh, interesting that this stuff hasn't popped up, let me see how I can manipulate that. I've never thought about that. Like that's what's interesting, which is why I don't use TikTok. Like you can't really do that as much with TikTok. I mean, you can a little bit, but it's too fleeting. That's why I love Instagram, or Twitter, is like you sit there, and you can take in the information, like with 30 seconds, and just sit there with it, rather than mindlessly scrolling. Do you have certain times at the day dedicated, when you're spending time with social media? Was it kind of periodically? I don't. It's pretty periodic. I mean, a lot of it's, right, just doing things, you know, for the podcast, and paying that up there, and then I'll take another five minutes and kind of just see what happens. But yeah, because I don't follow that many people, I really know what I'm expecting off the feed. And so I'm not, and nothing is like, whoa, I've never seen that before. A lot of it's just kind of like, okay, just kind of reinforcing that mindset, behavior, or what, what not. Okay. So what about, so you brought up some topics, right, token, water, things that we've talked about before, you know, that you love all kinds of things, philosophy, and just general purpose, and just a bigger picture. What are other things that you tend to see more often under feet? I'm curious. Like, what are some of the last five, seven things that are popped up? Yeah, no. So I break down the themes, right? It's a lot of his health. So anything helped related fitness, nutrition, water intake, supplements, things like that. So a lot of lane, nor in, peter, tea, people that we both follow, right? Wealth. So I follow a lot of money management. Like, see NBC make it, just looking at stories about how, what people have to do with entrepreneurship, love. So a lot of relationships as well, just, you know, how to raise children, already just kind of getting that mindset. I don't have kids of my own, but, you know, one day, just, just trying to stay ahead of the game a little bit to see kind of what's out there, what are the new parenting techniques? How are people talking about these things? Real quick. Has that been an intentional thing? Like, jump, like, have you tried to make that a thing? Or did your algorithm start doing this since, you know, the computer hurt me talking about parenting? Oh, no, I've had it. I've had it. Yeah. Because I think I've just found my own stuff. I've always been interested. Yeah. Got it. And then lastly is wisdom. So what do you know, books, book reviews, philosophy, Naval Ravi come on, those types of people, just to kind of gain new ideas. And then, you know, for me, again, it's about a spider web. So with those four themes, how can you kind of connect them and gain some value? And so again, when I go back to, I will unfollow somebody because they're just not adding value to any of those four, or it's just so far-fetched, for instance, Carnibor MD liver king, right? Like, following these people, because I know there's no real validation based off all the research we know, based off everyone else that has called them out and things, there's no value to it, even just watching it for me. Like, if anything, it's going to get me upset because I'm going to be like, why does this exist on social media, you know, like, so I'm trying to, I'm trying to avoid some of those people's dreams. Yeah, I'm trying to avoid negative emotion as well, yeah. Yeah. So speaking of, you highlighted some really popular and prominent people putting out information. I think it's really, really important, as you've alluded to multiple times now, knowing what to see and also knowing what to avoid and what not to see, whether it's in fall line. How, so actually something that we've already started, right? I think maybe was our second progress note where we highlighted some really bad research and people making some poor claims, actually we've done that more than once, and as you mentioned at the outset, that that's partly the purpose of this whole series right there. That, you know, people are doing it for all kinds of reasons, right? People are doing it for what, for power, for fame, for money, I mean, those are kind of the main reasons why people are doing for attention, right? And which is kind of like, is it love? Like, you know, I'm actually like, what's that really, these are the reasons people act out, right? For doing things. And so they're looking for love and looking for likes and that kind of stuff. And so we brought up another interesting point is that there's more quote unquote, shit talking now. And so people are highlighting this because that gets shared more frequently than the non-bad melting, right? About people, especially when people name drop and call out directly, say, okay, did you see this about this person? That's going to go more likely to go viral too. How do you filter out though going back to the original question is like, okay, this is a sort of somebody to avoid, you know, how does somebody get multiple strikes and what's a process like? Yeah, I think, you know, for us, it's a little bit easier, right? Because we're in the field, we're in medicine. We already be, we understand the, if it's too good to be true, this doesn't really, you know, let's look further into it. I think the other thing is, if it's totally like a wild idea, you know, if it's a wild idea, like you should not eat fruits, you should not eat veggies, you should only drink one glass of water a day or something, right? Like something that's just extreme stuff. That's just so not inherent to the way we live. It raises an eyebrow, right? And it's some of those things can be true, right? And this is where they try to lure you is like, and they'll constantly put posts. And I think the human mind goes, why would somebody put a post like this? Like who in their right mind would put a post like this? So then it's like, wait, they're putting a post on this because it has to be true. So I think that's like. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Why else would somebody do this? But then it goes back to what you were saying, fame, money, power, sex, right? Or like the four virtues that people always try to chase. And I think that's, it comes down to that. So in the end, like for us, I think it's, we look at a claim, we look at the comments, we see, hey, are they tagging any research? What are there, what's their feed like? What else are they posting about? Is it really just one after the other of just trying to lure people in? Or is it a, hey, this is like an anecdote? And here's my question and I'm going to leave it open and I don't know, which is awesome. That's great. I would love to hear that rather than this is what you have to do and this is the extreme version. Yeah. I think I'll, I'll just add on a couple things to that. I mean, I think what's really important to highlight, there are really no hard and fast rules with this. I think context, something that we've talked about time and time again is very, very important even with this conversation right here. And another thing to probably highlight is people make mistakes, right? Social media isn't perfect. I mean, we say silly. I mean, I speak for myself and I use stuff all the time. And we're wrong on here. We're wrong on our social media and we, you know, we correct ourselves and that's one of the reasons why this is probably something that we enjoy doing is because it's easy to kind of go back and it's time stamped and you can say, oh, what I said before, I don't believe that. But a couple of people recently have done good posts on their Brad Schofing Schoenfield has posted something about how to separate an expert or from a student expert. It might have been something in his story, I can't, I couldn't find it. But Lane Norton did recently share this, like nine tenets of, yeah, of finding somebody who was like, like BS, and I'll refer, yeah, yeah, I'll refer people to, but I did write that in the nine points really quickly and one of them you just brought up, like, so number one is being extreme, right? This is the one true way to get X school, right? This is the one way you're going to be a millionaire, right? This is how you acquire wealth. When we know that there are multiple ways to acquire wealth, right? I mean, you have got, you know, one Buffett says one way and then there are other people who are doing crypto and you have all these kinds of methods and put an active investing you have real estate, you have all the kind of stuff, but I'm like, this is the way to be a billionaire, not so much, or food, whatever. Number two, secret knowledge, right? I have secret that nobody else knows. I would like to much into it because some of us are explanatory, but again, we'll link the posts of people in check it out. Number three, and this is probably one of my favorite ones, research claims. Somebody show, quote, unquote, without, without actually citing studies, or citing studies that don't actually state that, or people who'll just quickly look at an abstract, but not actually read the paper and realize that they just don't even understand the research, right? But just say your research suggests or just this vague and we ask like, what research you're talking about? I'm not the person though, like that being said, I'm not the person that if somebody asks me that, and I can just throw out publications and public public public ideas on top of my head, but I have a vague idea and I can find it for you. So like if I ever say that, I'm like, you know, I think I came across a paper once and somebody said, what's a paper? Like reach out to me, and I will find that for you if I've said that. So that's another interesting one that I think pseudo experts tend to do a lot, and I think it's very, very interesting. Another one is invoking conspiracy, right? Like, oh, this is the reason why nobody wants to know it. And that kind of goes with the whole secret knowledge thing. Here's another one that he talks about appealing to anecdotes, right? One of my favorite things from E.C.'s, I think E.C.'s in Kowski said this is, you know, the plural of anecdotes is in data, right? Is, oh, this person had this happen, and we tend to see this a lot in medicine, a lot, a lot, a lot. People come to my clinic all the time, and you probably see this in junior practice where somebody would like, well, you know, my aunt's cousin had this happen, and orthobiologics is a big one for this, right? It's like, oh, they had, like, hemneotic tissue or placental or insert whatever stem cells and it works, so it must work, and that's a challenging one. The next one probably makes me the angriest and targeting vulnerable populations. So in the world of pain medicine, we see this a lot. Again, the whole thing, orthobiologics, people who are, quote, unquote, single salesman, right? Again, it could apply to anybody. People with autoimmune conditions who are just desperate and don't really have treatments in. People who have cancer, that kind of stuff, they throw that kind of stuff. So if you, like, I can't tell you how many patients I've seen in just my young career where they will travel to just don't fly out, I think of a patient right now in my clinic who just got, like, you know, all these challenging symptoms, and he's getting opinions from Johns Hopkins. He's flying out to Mayo Clinic and he's finding records and stuff and nobody can seem to help him, but he's like willing to go. And I think about somebody like this, when the traditional, quote, unquote, medical system can't find answers for them, they're much more likely to go somewhere else, right? And there are a lot of reasons for that, but I'll stop there. The next one is somebody who rejects criticism. So when they do, when they are attacked, rather than, you know, just saying, oh, okay, well, let me consider the other point of view. It's like, no, that person's a quack or this and that. And then, or you, you start, like, defaming that person is coming at you. And then last, maybe the next one is, you're building a tribe. And so again, you build falling and we've seen this happen time and time again in a social media, it's an easy way to do this, right? Maybe this is where the Twitter thing comes in winter. You post something, you get million likes and people comments, yes, yes, yes, I was actually seeing this this morning with Henry Covell, I don't know if you heard, he's no longer going to be Superman. Oh, no, I didn't know that. Yeah. Oh, so he just announced in October that they're bringing him back for Superman and then they got James Gunn, right, and they're writing it at a meeting, they're like, sorry, you're not going to be Superman. And so all these DC comic fans, right, this is your world, they're like, so pissed off, they're like, oh, James Gunn, you took away and it's just really interesting, I'm never going to watch DC and stuff. So that's the tribe. And then the last one, they refuse to change their views. So when they are, you know, in the light of new information, it's like, nope, I'm actually going to dig deeper into my old beliefs. So I thought that these were really interesting. I like those. Yeah. What are your thoughts about that? It's good. I do like, I think somewhere better than the others, because I think again, it comes over context and a lot of it's nuanced, right, like when we talk about, so a researcher on Instagram came back, gave an apology and was like, hey, I was wrong about lockdowns and mandates. And I was wrong about a lot of just this COVID stuff and he's like, the reason I'm coming out to say this is because not enough people are. And in order to us, in order for us to progress science, we need the public trust, right? And it's interesting because I'm all about apologies, but only if them, like on your next post and you keep going with whatever theme you're talking about, you still leave it open, right? When you look back at this person's post, very adamant on just like, nope, this is how lockdowns are. This is what mandates are. This is what we do about masking and like doubling down on everything. And then coming out with apology, I almost feel like, yeah, that's easy, right? It's about what you do after. Like that's what I'm looking at. I don't care if you apologize. I want to see what you do after. I want to see, are you, as Adam Grant will say, lose convictions, lose the held, right? A lot of people say strong convictions, lose the held and Adam Grant's like, well, actually, we don't know anything about anything. So let's keep losing convictions as well and just continue to keep learning, which is again, a tough way to live because then you just don't really have an opinion like how do you move forward? But I think, yeah, I think a lot of those are extremely accurate. But yeah, it's, it's definitely tough in the social media world. In person, you know, in a corporate world, definitely a lot easier to follow when it comes to social media, right? A lot of people are me like, well, look at COVID, look at the government. I don't trust them. Well, at least I can trust this person, social media, or why should I trust this expert or whatever? And how was he not a pseudo expert? So it's like, what's the gray area? You know, actually, you just brought up maybe arguably one of the most important points, like absolute conviction and, you know, strong opinions and stance and how we're, how we're communicating the information because, again, quote unquote, being an expert, right? Physiatrist, sports medicine for me, you're a physiatrist as well. So we're specialists, but really just doing about, if somebody comes and they're like, well, you know, what are your thoughts about this? Why do you think this is causing pain? And if I'm like, oh, I'm not really sure it could be this. It could be this or that's not, that's not good. I want the, is this, it's a hundred percent this. This is the reason why you have this pain or this is the reason, you know, why you're not losing weight or this is the reason it's straightforward. So people don't like uncertainty, right? And they're like, oh, this guy doesn't know what he's talking about, right? That person is an idiot who can go to the next person. And as a provider, you have to find that balance. You have to find that balance of confidence to say, hey, this is what I think it is, you know, blah, blah, blah. But it could also be these things and this is what we're going to do, right? So I wish we were more of a culture of action and more of a culture of kind of finding out rather than just leaving statements out there and then just saying, hey, this is what it is. But okay, this is the statement. Yeah, let's go and prove that statement and let's keep proving that statement. And I think that's really how science can progress on social media. Yeah, another thing that, you know, I've heard Lee talk about it and maybe other people is if somebody who is an expert that you're listening to a lot is talking about and you don't hear them to say the words like, I don't know where I'm not sure or to my knowledge or things like that or I'm not aware of any evidence or even if they're saying things like that. Like those are some, some good phrases that I like to hear people talking about every now and then again, we're speaking generalities here. But it's hard to kind of individualize every little thing. I want to follow up on some important concept that I think comes back. What are your thoughts about when people say, okay, you know, you need to quote unquote, look the part. We've kind of talked about this, how physicians need to, you know, practice what they preach, you know, in terms of health and, you know, it can't be smoking out in the parking lot and going and counsel somebody not smoking that kind of stuff. By the same token, though, you're probably familiar with people who will follow somebody on social media for advice on nutrition or how to build a suspect just because that person is lean busy. Okay, let's just, we talked about lubricant. Let's take delivery guy is just, I mean, he looks a certain way and people like, well, clearly, he knows what he's doing, right? But there are countless examples of that, right? On the flip side, somebody could not necessarily look the part. Let's take, I'm going to jump, jump things here. Let's take like Bill Bell check or somebody who is an incredible coach, but doesn't look like the greatest football player of all time or somebody who's a brilliant coach, you know, but doesn't have the best physique or a brilliant doctor, but doesn't look that part, whatever, like what are your thoughts about that part of it? Yeah, he's a question. I, it's a good topic. I thought about this some time ago and I like to divide it between like cerebral versus action, right? So like, from Bill Bell check, I would take a cerebral mind because he understands the game and oftentimes it's funny when you go on Twitter. It's like, this person would be the word, this player would be the worst coach. Like, why would they ever do that? It's like, well, you don't have to be a great player to be a great coach. Those are two very different mindsets. One's looking as a general, the other's looking as kind of a soldier, right? On the field. And so I look at somebody and say, okay, are they cerebral? Like, are they doing the research? Are they able to navigate the research? And based off that, are they able to tell the public? This is how you analyze something, right? And there's a lot of people actually on social media with that, you know, they don't look fit, but they're so good at telling the public, the, the latest sports medicine article, right? And then I look at like the David Goggins of the world, right? Which are the people who are doing action. And when it comes to action, I look for them for actionable advice. I'm not really taking the research based off them. I'm looking for, hey, what are your habits during the day? What has kind of worked for you? And that's where I'll self-experiment with that. So that's how I kind of think of it. It's like, I'm not going to take action habits from somebody who's trying to preach action, but doesn't look at. And I'm not necessarily going to take cerebral research things that I should, you know, hold on to if they're non-researchers or haven't really proved that to me. I love that. So it's kind of like a mentality, psychology versus cognition, intellectual, you know, and there's some crossover, but you kind of make this fine line in between. Yeah. Kind of like the Goggins thing. I've been listened to. I just listened to the Goggins Rogan interview the second book, the second one. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a special bearism, man. Yeah. He's something else. Okay, cool. I, another thing to kind of add on to that is, yeah, I'm kind of with you on that. You know, I, I, somebody that we follow, I don't know this guy's actual name, but he goes by a doctor. It's, yeah, on social media. And I think he's a, you know, it sounds like he's a physician across the pond over in the UK, somewhere in the Europe, somewhere, but really his Instagram content is all about nutrition. And I think he has a master of nutrition. He does a great job just spelling a lot of myths and actually studying and correcting people in the studies, but I think he made a post at some point. I remember on, on maybe metapause or something like that. And one of the first comments was, if you, if you don't have a menstrual cycle, don't speak. It's like, okay, excuse me, but his response was like, okay, I guess if I've never had cancer, I can't treat cancer patients in my heart disease, I can't treat the first physician really. So I just made me think, I was like, you know, it's about time somebody came at doctors for that because people saying that for NFL coaches, like they talked about all the time in sports and this and this and this. So it's really about time somebody came at doctors. So I was actually kind of happy about that. I was like, yes, get the doctors, no, that's a little silly, but I think that that comes to that point right there. So I mean, acquiring the knowledge kind of what you're getting at and becoming an expert and staying up to date, especially as it's up for changing, you don't need to share your own personal anecdote because on the flip side, people happen, well, you know, this is what I did for my metapause or this is what I did for my pain or this is how I fixed my thyroid cancer and therefore you should take your medication and just drink this juice and that that's where you have the challenge because again, as we've talked about time and time again, humans are tribal. And so if a doctor sitting in front of you and saying, well, listen, you know, I've never had cancer, but this is what the data says is what science says. Well, it's like, well, you're treating me off of research and this and this and this, but if I say, like, hey, I've been there. I've been I've been through the time that you're going and I've had that cancer and I came on the other side. Well, they're like, well, how'd you do it? Well, I had this juice right here and, you know, we just we will we share that, right? That's just innate. What do you I don't know I'm sure you have some thoughts on that if you want to add on that. No, I completely agree. I don't think there's much miles from me to add there. You know, I guess I could it was I guess I'll go into commenting, right? So like if you do create content and somebody comments, how do you respond? Right? And I guess this kind of leads us to like the plan of how do we take this further? So it's funny. I commented on the doctor is one of his videos about like glucose monitoring, right? And I was like, Oh, well, kind of here's the other side. And you know, Peter Tia has a beautifully written article about kind of what he thinks. And so I posted that to some people and they're like, well, there's no evidence for blah, blah, blah, blah. And so I wrote back a little bit and then somebody linked me a paper to Kevin Bass who debunked like Peter Tia. So I went on and I read that and I'm like, okay, here's a research paper. But then there's also just things where he's just bashing Peter Tia without any reference, right? And so it's interesting how this works is like we start out really well. We start out with like, Hey, here's the data, you know, and then we start filtering into like just opinions and then opinion and for example, it just starts breaking down. And so what I've realized is like, I keep doing this mistake is like whenever I engage on social media, I have to ask questions. I think like stoic or not stoic. So socratic method is like the way to go is that when there are these trolls or when there are people and social media who are commenting and trying to debunk you, just ask them questions. Because one, it doesn't come off aggressive. It comes off as if you want to know more and you want to learn more to you'll get an answer from them. And then three, you just continue to ask another question on that. And more often than not, they'll either be like, Oh, man, I was thinking about this wrong. Two, they'll stop responding because they don't want to lose a battle or you know, go to quote, lose a battle. So that's kind of what I realized is context matters, right? And the only way you get context is by asking questions rather than just putting statements out there about what you believe. Yeah, I think I'd love that approach because I think that it puts the honest on that person to provide more evidence to support strength in their argument. I think speaking of Adam Grant, he had a really good podcast recently with this world class debater, I think, as a champion of how to, you know, basically argue well. And essentially one of the thing was you just got to ask good questions, right, inform a later argument. So I really love that. You know, the interesting thing about that is when people, when you do ask questions sometimes or you make a comment, people just go find some research where a portion of it supports your argument and they throw that in. And again, this goes back to the earlier point that I made. They've actually haven't read that whole paper, right? So I haven't read the Kevin Vastic. I'm interested in checking that out, but actually this actually happened to me recently. You know, I can Peter TMA, a huge fan of him, but he recently says some stuff where I disagree with pretty strongly. And so I went to the show notes, I looked through that and looked some of the research articles and there were some actually gaping holes and at least in one or two of the studies. And so I want, but before I can kind of go ahead and point that out, I was like, I want to make sure that I'm not getting this wrong. So you re-evalued your own point even after I was like, okay, hey, this is actually incorrect, but I'm like, wait a second. But am I incorrect about this being incorrect? Which reminds me, something that you wanted to talk about is, you know, JV's podcast, that whole calling BS, right, where those people who essentially their job, I don't think it's paid, it's just not really a job, where this one guy, I remember him talking about, he's like, you know, these are people's career. So when you're before you're calling somebody out, you check in, you recheck and you recheck and then somebody has checks your work and you go through like 10 times and making sure before we post this or rebuttal or the right of the letter to the editor, we want to make sure that we're not getting these statistics wrong, we're thinking like that. I think that is so critical. I think we're so quick to just jump and call somebody out and be like, BS, BS, BS, wrong, liar, fake news that we don't check, hey, am I wrong by calling this? What if that could, that does happen to me a lot. Yeah. And the other thing those people are doing, right, they are, they're asking questions, so they're emailing whoever the author was and be like, hey, can I have your data? Or hey, what was your actual method for this, or, you know, they're starting off with a question to get more answers to understand their own evaluation at that point. So it's, it's, it's beautiful kind of what you said. If we imagine like having one on one with Peter T or let's just say he looks at your comment and you ask that question and be like, hey, am I looking at this wrong or like, what are your thoughts on this? Like that's so much more approachable and you're going to get so many more answers. And then when you're in the world of social media, other people can see that because as a content creator, you're probably going to pin that comment and put it to the top and, you know, now other people can see them and be like, oh, wow, well, this approach is probably the best approach. I should just ask the question and keep asking questions. That's what it's about, right? Asking questions for yourself, your own points of view, reevaluate or rethinking, making sure we're not getting something wrong. All right. So let's, let's kind of bring it back home here, you know, bring it back to the assessment of plan. So you mentioned earlier at Webview.no, we're going to live in this world, Twitter as much as people would like to say is going away. It's not going away anywhere. Yeah. Like it looks fine to me. Same thing with Instagram, social media, Facebook, Twitter, it's all, and we're going to have more stuff coming up, right? How do we, how do we continue navigating any closing thoughts, anything to add on to something that we haven't touched on yet? No, I think I'll just, I'll just reiterate, right, like you social media, don't let social media use you. Be intentional with it. Look at the things that you want to learn more about. Don't be afraid of entry out if you want, but don't be afraid to unfollow. Don't be afraid to be like, hey, this is too much negative energy. I'd rather follow, you know, some, some other folks just to get more positivity and just learn some other things. And then again, context is key. So if you don't know something and you want to attack, take a second, take a 10 second break and ask a question instead. Get more information from them, see what they actually mean. You're going to get more answers and then you can make a better decision. Yeah. I'll add two points on to that. I think, because what I found is, you know, a lot of times, as I mentioned, somebody says something and I find myself just having a visceral reaction to it. Because, you know, I know other evidence that disagrees with that. And I'm just like, oh God, this big green nauseate. And I'm tempted to switch off or turn it off, but I force myself to listen to the whole argument. It's usually in a podcast format or, you know, it could be on Instagram, so it's made or whatever. I'm good. And sometimes I will listen all the way through it and I'm like, okay, okay, they highlighted the argument a little bit better. I can maybe think about this a little bit deeper now. But sometimes it's just like, they finish the argument and like, God, I just wasted 20 minutes of my time and it got no better. I actually only got worse. I am getting better at sniffing out the BS faster and faster though. So I do think that that can be trained, right? Because the other thing, as you talked about it, as we're in the field and as we educate ourselves more and more about this stuff, when somebody just comes in, you're like, okay, I've looked at this specific problem from enough lenses for long enough that I know that this can't be right. Things that we already touched on today. The other thing I'll say is as we're thinking about following people and we're coming to the new year and we're going through that re-evaluating and making more of an active process, when people say stuff, take the totality of their points and their arguments and positions. Now look at all the data. Often we fall into this trap where we just listen to a single sound bite on one podcast or a clip that was re-shirted 36 times on TikTok and it was taken out of context and it's coming up in our field and we're like, whoa, this person said this, this is crazy, but like wait a second, let's go look at the source, whether it's the article that you're talking about or it's the actual podcast or it's like, hey, what was the conversation, like what were the three minutes before, like five minutes before, five minutes after, and actually read the whole thing, takes more time to do for sure, but I think that that's how we get better at continuing having this conversation, spread good information, and honestly get better at communicating with each other, so I think that that's kind of what I'll leave people with. Understand, and I'll add one last thing that kind of comes to mind is most of the things that people are trying to do to curate followers is adding like a little bit of that cherry on top, right, like you should eat 33 minutes after workout, right, like it's the things that probably in the grand scheme and things will not matter. So if you look at something and you're like, this is kind of way off of like what would make sense to me in my daily lifestyle, well, then you don't need to change, you don't need to listen to those things, and if you really think about it, it's going to take more than just one or two papers to really, you know, change the way we live or change our habits in terms of making that exact change, if it is something that's so drastic. So in the end, that probably doesn't really matter. And that's especially critical because so many things that we talk about are kind of on the cusp of like what's known and what's to come, right, the future. And that's a critical point for people to understand when you're living on that line or in that engine where we're kind of pushing towards progress, that that's, we shouldn't just overhaul everything we already know. That's not good science does our work that way. So yeah, thank you for that. I think a red light therapy episode, right, I mean, there's good data on it, but there's still so much more that we need to learn, right? Like yes, we do understand, and currently there's kind of it's the light. We know that. But in what way and what aspect, right? So now we're trying to add those cherries on top and trying to make it applicable to people, you know, what joins, what time, all these things. But you know, we put links in the show notes so that people can look at the science, look at their research. And if they want to get it, because hey, they can afford a placebo effect, maybe, or hey, it's actually working, then by all means get it if you're not seeing negative effects. But to completely, you know, you know, rob your bank by yourself just because you think red light therapy might do something and it could, I don't know if that's like, you know, the wisest choice, if they're, if we do need more data. Well, that's what it is, man. I think we always try to tell people, we're still learning about this, we're still learning more, we're still learning more. And I think that's how it should be. And so hopefully people continue learning and, yeah, hopefully we do a good job at it. Hey, this was a fun episode. Awesome. Cool. All right, guys, as always, you know, if there's anything that you liked and you, or didn't like, you know, always shoot us an email. Let us know. Med redefine at gmo.com or you could hit us up on social media, really on all the social media platforms that we're on, either on personal ones or just the, the main page we love to hear your feedback and, um, would be happy if you could share with somebody who you think will benefit from this. Until next time, guys, see you. Thanks for tuning into another episode of The Progress Note. Now, if there's any health-related videos or content that you come across that you want us to validate or do a deep dive on, be sure to send it our way through our socials at medredefined or email us at medredefined at gmail.com. I wanted to thank our team for the production of this podcast, Ethan Jew, Harita Yapuri, and Iman Bashiri. And as always, the medical disclaimer, everything in this podcast is for educational purposes only. It does not constitute the price of medicine and we are not providing medical advice. No physician patient relationship is formed and anything discussed in this podcast does not represent the views of our employers. We recommend that you seek the guidance of your personal physician regarding any specific health-weight issues. Until next time.