Doctor Mike’s Internet Medicine
Awoman was wheeled into the E.R. with a hectic red rash on her leg, painful to the touch. Dr. Mikhail Varshavski looked it over. “If it continues to spread past the demarcation that we usually draw using a skin marker—we say Sharpie, but it’s a skin marker—we say that this is spreading,” he commented. Diagnosis: possible sepsis.
Varshavski was not talking to the patient or to nursing staff. He was not even in a hospital. He was speaking into a camera in a two-bedroom apartment on the fifty-sixth floor of a building in Hell’s Kitchen, in a makeshift studio where he records videos and his popular podcast, “The Checkup with Doctor Mike.” He had on form-fitting royal-blue scrubs and no shoes. The “patient” he was observing wasn’t a patient at all but an actor on Season 2 of “The Pitt.”
As the episode continued and other patients appeared—a mother with metastatic cancer, a badly beaten prisoner, a Gen Z-er burned by dry ice from a botched branding—Varshavski periodically hit Pause and explained the medical lingo and the treatments, drawn from his own experience as a family-medicine physician. At one point, he tsk-tsked at the way the onscreen doctors were revealing their own “interpersonal conflict” in front of a patient. And when a “Pitt” doctor touted an A.I. app that charts patients’ medical info, Varshavski grimaced. “I’m always very sus about these,” he said. “But I’m opening up to them.”
Color commentary on TV hospital shows is only a small slice of what Varshavski, known to his nearly fifteen million YouTube subscribers as Dr. Mike, puts out into the world. He makes videos of himself clarifying basic medical misconceptions and debunking cranks—Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is a common target, as are influencers hawking dodgy supplements. He also interviews prominent doctors, celebrities (Noah Wyle), and powerful politicians (Chuck Schumer and Kamala Harris).
When planning his content, he bows to the algorithm. “We need to do silly videos, because then we’re in viewers’ watch history,” he said. If they see a video he makes with his dogs, chances are they’ll see a video he makes about how vaccines eradicated smallpox.
Varshavski has been posting videos for nearly a decade, but these days, with R.F.K., Jr., running the Department of Health and Human Services, measles spreading, and the “wellness” industry endorsing pseudoscience, the doctor is especially eager to engage viewers who are misinformed—as well as the people who are doing the misinforming. He appears on Fox News; he has debated groups of vaccine skeptics and MAHA true believers. Communication, he likes to say, is as critical online as it is in an examination room. “People say, ‘Dr. Mike, you’re a great doctor, but my doctor sucks,’ ” he said. “That could be true!”
Varshavski was born in the U.S.S.R. three days after the fall of the Berlin Wall and moved to New York City when he was six. He picked up boxing during medical school and still trains. Two days a week, he sees patients at a health center in Chatham, New Jersey; he donates his salary back to the center.
In 2015, People magazine named Varshavski “the sexiest doctor alive.” He’s aware of the legacy of famous media doctors who preceded him and is wary of relaxing his standards in order to stay in the spotlight. “That’s why a show like ‘The Dr. Oz Show,’ which initially started off with providing really good evidence about exercise and the benefits of eating a well-rounded diet, devolved into saying how your zodiac sign impacts your health,” he said.
MAHA, Varshavski believes, has become its own worst enemy. “It is a fractured movement,” he said. “It started off with the idea that we want Americans to be healthy, and it’s been co-opted to be an agenda to make a certain proportion of the population very wealthy at the expense of science, at the expense of children getting sick.”
In his immaculate kitchen, looking out at views spreading from Central Park to Brooklyn, he sat down to a plate of takeout chicken and vegetables. (There was no ultra-processed food in sight, although a bar cart held bottles of Clase Azul and Johnnie Walker Blue.) When asked what he considers to be his unhealthiest habit, he thought for a moment. “I used to say poor sleep,” he said. (He now tries to get at least seven hours a night.) “But my cholesterol is really bad.” A few bites later, he added, “Another unhealthy thing I do is box.” ♦