Physician! Explain thyself! Why would a doctor join TikTok?

I joined TikTok in January 2021. As governments debate over its merits and flaws, I can say unequivocally that it has been a positive experience for me. I was encouraged to join from a young person in my life. Aishwarya is in her 20s, and she said there were creators on the app who were speaking about mental health. While I'm a physician, most of my work is as a trauma therapist for the last five years now. She thought I could spread clear and truthful information. Knowledge translation, what we academics called KT, is a skill. It’s one thing to understand complex thoughts and connect different epistemologies to come up with innovative concepts. It’s another thing to explain difficult concepts in a way that is accessible, acceptable and accurate. Throughout my career, I've always worked in resource-limited settings. This meant folks who have less formal education, newcomers—such as immigrants and refugees—and people whose trauma was so significant, they weren’t accessing the cognitive parts of their brain. All of this meant in order for me to be effective as a physician, I needed to learn how to explain myself. When I became a physician, I had to learn a fair bit of Latin. Medicine is basically a whole other language. When you subspecialize, you learn even more details of that language. And we often cause medical trauma and hardship by using this precise but unintelligible language to explain complex scenarios to patients. And of course when they don’t understand what we say, we blame them for making decisions that are counter to our recommendations. Or, even worse, when we don’t offer them a chance to negotiate the treatment plan, we might call them non-compliant. It’s this exchange of understanding, predicated on the use of sensible vocabulary, where we often fail as a profession. Knowledge translation is one of the key activities on TikTok. There are many creators with expertise and lived experience, not that I differentiate between these two things, who are able to share their story and ideas they’ve learned in concise ways. The one-minute timing when I first joined was a very concrete rate-limiting step. But I’ve always heard it’s harder to be brief in your writing than verbose. If you have all the time, and word count, in the world to explain the concept, that should be relatively easy. But when you have just one minute . . . TikTok allows me to marry my creative side with my rational scientific mind. I’ve done some videos in costume, others as a role-play, and still others with the illustrations bouncing across the screen. I’ve met an incredible community of mental health creators online. Despite the cries about misinformation on the app, that’s not what typically comes across my feed. Licensed clinical social workers, doctors, psychologists, researchers, neuropsychologists. Absolute brilliance. But the true brilliance is how they can express themselves in under a minute. While governments are blaming TikTok for its lack of privacy, not looking in the mirror of the even bigger players that were homegrown in the American garden, I just want to put it out there that I’ve enjoyed my time. Each and every minute. No matter what happens. What did happen? My book. The Modern Trauma Toolkit releases in May, 2023.

Physician! Explain thyself! Why would a doctor join TikTok?

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Trauma in medicine

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Christine Gibson

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