Dr. Joel Bervell, better known as The Medical Mythbuster, discusses the power of the individual and the unexpected impact of social media on health equity and accessibility.
There’s an increasing concern about the physician shortage, especially in underserved communities. What do you think are the biggest barriers preventing students from pursuing healthcare careers, and how can we overcome them?
I think one of the biggest barriers is the financial burden of medical education. The cost of tuition for medical school can get up to $250,000 or more. Some institutions are $100,000 per year. In addition to admission fees, there are unpaid clinical rotations that can deter students, especially those from underrepresented backgrounds.
There’s also a lack of mentorship in different areas and limited exposure to healthcare careers early on. I always say “You can’t be what you can’t see.” If you don’t know that a career in medicine is even possible, it’s impossible to get there. To fix that, you need to create more pipeline programs that provide mentorship and financial assistance to students from diverse backgrounds.
I started a program at my medical school called the Coug Health Academic Mentoring Program (CHAMP). We provide mentorship every quarter to high school students. We bring in physicians from the community, and we actually teach them how to suture. We talk about what we learn in medical school, and I’ve noticed that students are always so much more fascinated by medicine after that because they finally understand what it actually looks like.
I think it’s important to highlight that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives are under attack right now. Everything I’ve just talked about, from creating programs to generating funding and finding students who are interested in these careers, falls under DEI. Those are the programs that are right now being cut, so the next generation of students don’t even get access to spaces like this.
Your advocacy for healthcare equity and education has made a significant impact. Was there a defining moment in your medical journey that pushed you to take on this role?
When I was growing up, my grandma was my main caretaker. My parents were both working and going to school at the same time, trying to provide a better life for my siblings and me. When I was in sixth grade, my grandma ended up going back to Ghana because we were old enough to take care of ourselves. Within a year, she passed away. The reason why was because she had contracted malaria and gone to the hospital.
I remember hearing later that there were delays in her care by the hospital staff because she was expected to bring her own materials to the hospital. That was the first time I remember realizing that healthcare disparities existed, and I wanted to mitigate these disparities, help to highlight them, and show people in my community how these exist in the first place. As time went on, I began to realize that these disparities don’t just exist in a global context; they exist right here within the United States.
In college, when I went to Yale, I learned that someone’s ZIP code is a better indicator of their health than their genetic code. Where you live is such a strong indicator of your health, and in some cities, the differences in life expectancy can be drastic. It can be up to 10 years of difference in two different places, so those types of things really make me want to better understand health equity.
Another reason was that I came across a study in the New England Journal of Medicine that looked at these devices called pulse oximeters. They go on our fingers and they measure your blood oxygen saturation level. The study showed that black patients were three times more likely to have their oxygen levels overestimated, which could have led to delays in critical care. I made a video about that in December 2020, and within 24 hours it went viral. It had over half a million views, and there were doctors and nurses saying “I’ve been working in medicine for 20-30 years and I had no idea this existed,” or patients saying “Is this what happened to my loved one?” For me, this was a moment where I realized that I’d never learned about the disparity with the pulse oximeter in my classes; I’d heard about it because someone shared it on an Instagram Story. It made me realize just how many significant things that impact patients day-to-day aren’t talked about in medical school and beyond. That video became the first of many racial bias in medicine videos, the crux of the work I do today.
Many aspiring doctors look up to you for inspiration online. What’s something you wish more students knew about the realities of a career in medicine that they might not see on social media?
I think if you were to look at TV shows or the social media posts of doctors, you’d assume that every single doctor is the smartest person out there. The myth I’d like to dispel is that medicine is not just about intelligence or hard work. Those are important, but it’s also about resilience. For anyone going into this field, there are moments of doubt, burnout, and frustration — especially when navigating systemic issues. The most important thing for someone wanting to go into the field of medicine is figuring out your “why.”
What is it that drives you in the darkest days or the hardest times? Those are what will make you remember why you do this in the first place. For me, my “why” has always been my grandma. Whenever I see a patient or I’ve been working 24 hours straight, I always think back to my “why,” and that keeps me going.
One other thing I hope that people realize is that being a doctor is not about having all the right answers. It’s about asking the right questions and advocating for patients — even when the system makes it difficult.
If you could go back and give advice to yourself as a medical student, what would it be?
I think my advice is that a setback is a setup for a comeback. I think in all aspects of life, we’re going to have these moments where we second guess ourselves or we wonder whether we’re in the right field. There were so many times I almost didn’t do medicine. I spent a summer working at Google, I did a lot of health policy, and I was like, “Is medicine really for me?” During my junior summer of college, I met these physicians at Howard University Hospital, and they instilled in me a belief that I could be an incredible doctor if I really wanted to be. Seeing how their patients interacted with them — specifically, patients from the Black community coming in and saying you’re my first Black doctor or the way the doctors spoke to these patients knowing what it was like being from that specific neighborhood — it was so inspiring to see the connections that were built between a doctor and a patient. I could see the difference in them responding to someone who actually understood them. So, the only advice I’d go back and give myself is “You’re in the right place. Keep doing what you’re doing, and at the end of the day, your impact will continue by just following what you feel is right.”
What’s been the most unexpected or surprising lesson from your journey in medicine?
I was surprised by how much non-medical factors shape health outcomes. I came into medicine thinking my role would be primarily diagnosing and treating diseases, and, of course, that’s very important. However, I realized quickly that there are so many other things — access to transportation, food insecurity, systemic biases in healthcare — that all impact the delivery of healthcare just as much if not more than a prescription does. If a patient can’t even go and pick up the prescription that you’ve given them, have you actually helped them get better at all?
I also think it’s surprising how much social media can be a vehicle for having these conversations. I didn’t expect that a TikTok video would directly, for example, lead to someone going and getting a cancer diagnosis or getting moved up four years in the kidney transplant list. Those were things I could never have imagined happening from just making a 1-minute video, posting it online, and then actually seeing changes in real-time.
Some of the biggest challenges in medicine today — access to care, misinformation, and systemic barriers — can feel overwhelming. How can young healthcare professionals stay motivated to make a difference without feeling discouraged by these larger issues?
I’d say focus on the impact that you can make. No one person is going to be able to fix the entire healthcare system, but what is going to fix the entire healthcare system is small actions. That’s educating a patient, mentoring a student, or using your own voice to challenge disparities that you see in your own classes. Those things end up adding up.
Also, don’t underestimate the power of sharing your story and the power of social media. Sharing knowledge is like a ripple — it can ripple outward and make waves that you don’t even realize. When I was in high school, I think one of the things that made me want to be a part of making a change was a speech by John Norlin, who talked about the amazing law of influence. He had all of us in the auditorium hold up our pinkies. He said, “Right now, you’re hitting one atom that is hitting another atom that is hitting another one, and you could be creating a tsunami somewhere across the world. One life touches another life, and potentially both lives are changed — potentially the whole world has changed. Every single day, focus on the small things that you can do, and those will eventually add up to big actions and change the whole world.
