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Dr. Mike
Who is going to stand up to Secretary Kennedy and get the number of impressions needed to counteract his inaccurate message?
Tara Palmeri
Welcome back to the TARA PALMERI SHOW. Dr. Mike is on a mission not about politics, but about public health. He believes medical misinformation won't be defeated by fact sheets, press conferences, or experts talking at people. The only way to counter the falsehoods pushed by RFK Jr. MAGA influencers and voices inside the administration is through engagement from actual doctors. As a board certified family physician, Dr. Mike isn't just debunking bad information. He's meeting skeptics where they are, listening to their concerns and trying in real time to change minds.
Dr. Mike
Administrators have ballooned beyond any reasonable level. Pharmaceutical companies have no transparency. And instead of going after those issues, Secretary Kennedy's calling me a profit monger. Aren't you mad at that? Yes, I absolutely am.
Tara Palmeri
He believes the trust broken during COVID won't be rebuilt in exam rooms or brochures. It has to happen where people actually are online. With 14.6 million subscribers on YouTube, Dr. Mike has taken the fight directly to social media, waging a battle for the future of the health movement, one grounded in science, not conspiracy. He's willing to work with any administration that's serious about results for him. This isn't left verse right, it's about public good over politics.
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Dr. Mike
Yours?
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Dr. Mike
So same time next week?
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Tara Palmeri
Dr. Mike, thanks for coming on the show. This is a real treat. I have admired your work from afar. The audience you've built is incredible, but you've really been able to do it by translating medicine for people. So who don't necessarily trust institutions. And it's sad that we're at this place. It's actually part of the reason why I went independent as a journalist is that I've seen people also not trust journalism and cling to misinformation. And I feel like if we can, you know, get off our high horses, build community and show the process and how we make our decisions and own up to when we make mistakes and just explain where we're coming from, that we can build that trust. So I think you've really done that, and especially with the. The Jubilee conversations. I enjoyed watching your latest one, which is why I reached out to your producer, Sam. But I would think that this has probably pulled you into more political territory than you signed up for when you went to med school. What's that been like for.
Dr. Mike
Yeah, obviously. Thank you so much for having me on. Really get excited to talk about this topic because as you said, transparency is so important. Community building more important than ever. I think as a medical institution, we've kind of put that into the back burner and as a result are now suffering the consequences of major, major losses of trust in healthcare institutions and hospitals. Maybe sometimes for the right reasons, against federal agencies these days. But, yeah, I think right now the situation has blurred the lines between politics and healthcare. And I used to say that my content and when I'm putting out scientific information to the world, it wasn't political. But now that I think about it, that's not a correct take in order to advocate for public health. It's inherently political. What I really should have said is that it's not partisan because the information I'm putting out should apply to an individual who's left, right or center. It's about the human being as we are all human beings, and we're trying to do the right thing across an entire group of people. So when we're putting out information, we're trying to do it with the least partisan lens as possible. We're all humans, so we're all capable of falling victim to some bias, but we try and do our best to limit that bias as much as possible. Which is why over the last decade, we've worked with the Trump administration, during the beginnings of the COVID pandemic, with the Biden administration, and even had FDA Commissioner Makari on to talk about what's going to be happening once he took point.
Tara Palmeri
Yeah, I've actually known Marty for a very long time, since he was a regular and at CNN and I was a guest, a news assistant at the time. But yeah, to see him rise all the way up the ranks, it's really interesting. I definitely want to talk about what he and RFK Jr have been up to, but I first want to talk about this idea of, you know, engaging with people rather than ignoring. And I see in these debates that you're often up against anecdotal evidence rather than data. And I just, I'm curious how, how do you manage to convince not just these people that are coming from a specific position, they're either RFK supporters or they're anti vaxxers to. To show them. I'm not dismissing your anecdotal experience, what happened to you, your testimony, but like, this is the data and how do you win them over?
Dr. Mike
Yeah, I think I actually don't take any specific strategies other than express my genuine curiosity for wanting to learn about what's driving their decisions, what's driving their emotions. And that's how I try and go into every patient encounter, let alone a debate on social media where millions are watching. But what I've come to notice is over the last few years is that politics has been driven largely by those who are most passionate. And people who have been hurt by a system or not heard by a system are oftentimes the ones leading the charge because they're the. The ones that are most passionate, the ones that are voting, the ones that are out there making use of new technologies. And as a healthcare industry, as a scientific industry, we've kind of perched ourselves on this high horse where we said we're above doing debates with individuals who don't understand the data. They can never understand what we understand. And I think that's incredibly untrue. I think if you look at a classroom as an example, if the entire classroom starts losing trust in the teacher or failing, that is not the students being bad. It's more of a systemic issue at that point. It's not just one student failing because they didn't sleep well the night before the test or they didn't study. It's the entire classroom that's failing. And right now we have an entire country that has, by the huge majority, lost trust in medical institutions, in the federal government. They've heard conflicting reports coming out about research. And the physicians, the researchers haven't been there to do the quality education, to get down on a human level and have a conversation about what's driving people to have the fears that they're having. That's why I was so proud about doing these jubilee debates, because it gave me an Opportunity to show the world what it's like for a doctor to speak to a patient or an individual who doesn't agree with them and how that encounter should go. And, and the goal of those videos was not to win everyone over. That almost never happens. The idea is just for us to at the very least like one another, to see the human side in one another so that they can better understand where I'm coming from and I can better understand where they're coming from so that I can become more effective in my next conversations. And perhaps they can be a little bit more skeptical when they're being introduced new.
Tara Palmeri
And I think you're right, and it's a matter of having those hard conversations and admitting when you're wrong too. And I think that's why so many people have become particularly distrustful of doctors and medical institutions post Covid. But the strange thing to me, which I can't really wrap my head around, is how they're distrustful of these medical institutions and doctors, but not President Trump, who had Operation Warp Speed and pushed the vaccine until he realized it was unpopular and then flip flopped on it for political reasons. What do you make of all of that?
Dr. Mike
Yeah, I think the reason why people feel perhaps hypocritically angry at certain healthcare institutions, where at one point they may have been fans of those institutions, is largely because we as a health care entity have not made use of the tool of social media. And it's weird to think about social media as a healthcare tool because when I got into the field, I never thought that these two fields, healthcare and social media, can exist symbiotically. It almost felt like you either sell out, become a person selling miracles snake oil on abc, or you start making influencer supplement products. And what I came to realize is that we've tragically underutilized the tool of reaching out millions, billions of people. And as a result, the people who have invested in those tools are significantly more effective in reaching people and changing their minds. So when Secretary Kennedy will put out a tweet or an X message, he will get 1 to 3 million impressions on his tweet. But when the American Academy of Pediatrics or the American Medical association comes out and puts out a message because they haven't invested in developing proper social media content, they get ten impressions, a thousand impressions. The sad part is it's almost as if they didn't do it. It almost becomes a waste of time to do it. And I think due to this lack of investment, we are losing the communication.
Tara Palmeri
Because people trust people. They don't just trust data from anonymous institutes or academies where they don't trust people that they probably don't interact with day to day. And, you know, sometimes the stats aren't right. But I do think it's interesting that you bring up RFK Jr. Because he's really gained traction by questioning vaccines and public health institutions. And you were saying it takes more social media and I was thinking you could be that. I mean, I think you are starting to be that anti RFK messaging machine on YouTube. You have such a big following there. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's. I don't know though, from your perspective though, what makes him such a good communicator? Why is he so persuasive to so many people? He's not particularly good on tv in my opinion. I don't think he's that great even in interviews.
Dr. Mike
I think he's realized that in the era of short form communication where nuance is not necessary, his buzzy messaging thrives. If we rewind, you probably know this better than me, 10 years ago, maybe 20 years ago, in traditional media, if RFK Jr. Said something inaccurate, then what would happen? The American Academy of Pediatrics would send their chief medical officer or their CEO or whoever's in charge to 60 Minutes to Nightline and all of America would tune in, or at least highlights of it would be across all the major networks and therefore that message would get squashed because an expert proved it to be untrue. But now there is no fact checking process. Who is going to stand up to Secretary Kennedy and get the number of impressions needed to counteract his inaccurate messaging? Especially when in order to counteract his messaging requires nuance time, someone's attention span to be locked in for at least several minutes as opposed to the 10, 15 seconds of a soundbite.
Tara Palmeri
Exactly. There. It's, it's kind of the damage is done. I mean, just think about last night. President Trump sent out a truth social telling pregnant women do not take Tylenol, which he said consistently and then backtracked on and saying, don't give it to your kids. I mean, how do you walk back a message from the President of the United States that's probably going out to hundreds of millions of people.
Dr. Mike
Yeah, the message that I'm giving to my patients, my viewers, it used to be a message of trust the CDC and fda, but because of the inaccuracies being put forward, even the graphic put out by the White House about the number of vaccines a baby Gets isn't an accurate image. I mean, they're spinning the image in order to look more scary to parents. And that's not what we try and do in healthcare. So what I tell parents and patients to do is to rely on the organizations that represent groups of physicians. So the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Family Physicians, idsa, there's many legitimate groups to follow as well as referring to your primary care doctor. However, I do have one small concern with that and we'll see how this plays out in the long run. Traditionally, primary care doctors and in general more broadly, physicians would get guidance from the CDC and FDA about recommendations about what they should recommend to patients because it's necessary to facilitate that research getting into the hands of physicians. But when the organizations like the CDC and FDA are not putting out good quality recommendations that have been peer reviewed, that have been debated, that have been based on new available data, now you're going to be misguiding even physicians for the coming years. Hopefully they'll be able to push back against that and seek guidance from their own professional respective organization.
Tara Palmeri
I did some reporting about that earlier in the year. People in RFK Junior's communication shop at the hhs, they're being told don't trust the data, put out misinformation, and they felt uncomfortable about it being spokespeople for, you know, not relying on data when putting out information. They didn't know how to respond to media reports because they know how important it is that they get it right and that what people read in the New York Times is going to impact their decision making. But I want to ask you about the latest health and Human services reduced vaccines from kids from 17 to 11. They've changed the vaccine schedule. They've said, you know, they don't have to get flu shots anymore. I mean, they're not saying you don't have to, but they're lowering the recommendation for flu shots. And you know, they really changed this. Comparing it to Denmark, they said, which recommends about 10 to 11. So what do you think about this latest recommendation?
Dr. Mike
I think the whole comparison to a specific nation that is, I believe 2% of our population that has greatly different risk tolerances, that has a nationwide health care system where they can actually keep track of certain conditions, there is not tremendous equity disparities as we have here in the United States is a disaster. And what's interesting is that they keep putting out this messaging that we're matching other developed nations, European nations, I think even under the image of the two babies Based on how many vaccines they get. They wrote a European country like, how infantile and ridiculous is this type of logic where they selected one specific country that matches ours in very few ways. And as opposed to comparing us to, let's say, Canada, Australia, Germany, which perhaps are a little bit more alike to our own nation, which have similar vaccination, if not the same vaccine schedules as ours. So the idea of how they're making these decisions is already flawed at the outset. You don't choose which vaccines to recommend based on what others are doing it. You're doing it based on what research tells you, what data tells you, and only then can you make adequate recommendations. And with this change, this was done unilaterally. It was even bypassed by the acip, the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices, which is a first of its own. My hope is that this will be litigated in court due to the Administration Procedures act or something. There is some history here where unilaterally they aren't allowed to make these changes. But my concern is this policy signal matters. So what the CDC says, even if it's not purely removing the vaccines from being available to certain families, they're making it more difficult. They're adding hoops that people have to jump through. Those hoops are going to become more problematic based on equity. Those who do not have great access to a physician, those who have less money are therefore going to have lower immunization rates. They're going to be the ones that are being exposed to these communicable diseases, and as a result, we're going to see children get more sick. I'm not one to fear Monger. I'm not one to say extreme statements, but this is a stupid decision that is not based on science. And as a result, children are going to suffer. For what reason, I still don't know. I've tried to make some sort of logic as to why they're making certain decisions with hhs, but none of them have any rhyme or reason. It seems like they're being done on a whim. And I don't think that's how science should be done. And I think even the parents that are skeptical of vaccines don't believe that that's how science should be.
Tara Palmeri
Yeah. You know, when I was home for Christmas, I learned that there is a measles and mumps outbreak in North Carolina and South Carolina. And my brother is expecting a baby and told my parents he doesn't want them to go to church because he's afraid that they'll bring it back that it's gotten so out of control in the area. I mean what's going on here is this because people have just become natural. They're getting these messages and they just think now I'm not going to vaccinate or they're not going to vaccinate their children.
Dr. Mike
I think the message, the issue is twofold. One, there are some parents usually in the single digits that don't want to vaccinate, vaccinate their children and they now have the opportunity to not do that, which ultimately is a disservice to their children. Second, you have people who fall through the cracks when things are not followed by a standard protocol where the recommendation is removed and it's moved to shared decision making. There is more of an opportunity for an infection to set in. This is why we frequently don't recommend delaying vaccines for comfort, just to spread them out because someone has a potentially non scientific fear of the, of the shots. Because the more you delay vaccines the higher likelihood that these diseases can set in. And some of them measles as a great example is contagious, one of the most contagious diseases out there. So you have a condition that spreads like wildfire that's being allowed to spread across a pediatric population in different pockets of the United States. What's the outcome? Well, the highest amount of measles that we've ever had in the United States since 1993. That's over 30 years we're setting like I'm pretty sure make America healthy again did not mean make measles happen again. But that's the reality and the unfortunate reality we're seeing in the US what.
Tara Palmeri
Do you think is going to be the long term impact of all of this?
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Tara Palmeri
Because they'll be out of office maybe in a few years. Maybe a Democrat comes in reverses, all of it. But we've had about four years of children maybe not being vaccinated, people no longer. I don't know if the Tylenol really matters in the long run, but a lot of claims that become baked into the American psyche.
Dr. Mike
I think the more we flip flop as government healthcare institutions, the loss of trust will be huge. Because as I've seen in my career, whenever there's a little study published about coffee prolonging life or coffee increasing pancreatic cancer risk. People hear these types of flip flops within the press and they assume that scientists don't know what they're talking about. But the reality has been is that we haven't educated the public in a good way to understand what research is, how research is conducted, what is good quality versus low quality. Even the idea that expert opinion, meaning my opinion as a physician, should be the lowest level of evidence. When we talk about the value of evidence, we have this evidence level of hierarchy and we should keep the top of that hierarchy. Meta analyses, systemic reviews, randomized controlled studies that have been grouped together. And at the bottom of that should be my opinion about how I feel about that research. And yet people think that when a specific doctor supports Secretary Kennedy that they must be telling the truth because they are not shills for some medical industry. When in reality it just changes where the money is coming from. A lot of these individuals that frequently call out the pharmaceutical industry being for profit are selling their own supplements. In fact, they're not supporting companies, they're making their own profits directly. They're attacking doctors for taking a fifty dollar lunch from a pharmaceutical company, but they're making millions selling their own half baked, unproven, unreliable products.
Tara Palmeri
There are a lot of charlatans in that game. And you know, the only way to sell something is to create a problem the market. If you say, I mean, I do think the pharmaceutical company obviously benefits from us being sick. I think that's a fact. And there isn't enough wellness prevention in this country. I lived in Europe for a few years and I will say I was a much healthier person. The quality of food. I covered the ttip, their attempt at doing a transatlantic partnership with America at the 28 European Union states. We're going to try to do that nation states and it fell through because people were rioting in the streets saying we don't want your chlorinated chicken, we don't want your meats with hormones, you know, the quality of our food and our products. We regulate our skin products. I think there is like 90 products they won't put in their skin products that we will allow. And so I felt healthier and cleaner. And maybe it's just the lifestyle too a little, no pasta, nada. But it's like a different, it's a different world sometimes I think it's just being, having a more regulated system that we don't have here. It does feel like big pharma, Big Food, big Ag, like they just seem to control everything. And I do think RFK is getting it right when he goes there. But at the, on the flip side, they take it and they sell these supplements and they sell these vaccine lies and they have to, they have to like take it to the next level to terrify people rather than just being like, a healthy lifestyle will improve your health if you can. Unfortunately, it's expensive, but if you can afford, you know, organic foods, then you will probably live a healthier lifestyle to walk, work out, stress management, I don't know.
Dr. Mike
Yeah, you, the, the issue that you're pointing out about us being more sick is a legitimate issue and there are multiple reasons for it. So we've gotten really good as a nation in treating acute illness. So if someone's having a heart attack or stroke, if they're actively struggling with diabetes, we've helped these people not die from these illnesses. So the mortality acutely has gone down. But because we found management for those conditions, which I think is a win, because if I can help someone who has diabetes, type 2 diabetes, let's say, live a full life, considered a chronic health patient, as opposed to dying at age 30, to me, that's a win. However, we do, would we would like to go one step further to find cures for these conditions, to find better treatments for the conditions. However, we have to think about systemically what's happening. We don't have a good health care system. Our relationship with our primary care doctors is dwindling. Because I have less time with my patients, there's not enough primary care physicians to actually develop a relationship. And that continuity of care that you might have in other nations like Denmark or in the uk, and then the big one is our food supply, you touched on it briefly, but the large capitalistic force that pushes certain ingredients in food, which are not these toxic ingredients that Secretary Kennedy wants to go after, it's more of the simple stuff, the corn syrup, the things that are cheap to produce becomes the most profitable, they're the most addicting, and we become unhealthy. We actually started exporting this unhealthy ultra processed food across the world and now impacting the obesity rates globally. So there needs to be a systemic change. But the sad part is the Maha movement is not attacking those issues that are actually hurting us. There have been changes to titanium dioxide being taken out of Skittles, which doesn't make Skittles a healthy food. All of a sudden it's just pure sugar. That's the issue. So when I See Secretary Kennedy sitting at a steak and shake, downing burgers, fries, Coca Cola and saying how brave it is that they're using a different type of oil or they're using a different sweetener. It makes no sense because the issue wasn't those individual ingredients. It's that fast food environment that we have in the US And I'd love to see the Maha movement addressed those issues. Unfortunately that, that was always a myth from the start. They were never interested in making those changes. And what they are chasing is PR wins in order to stay in power and really cultivate this fear based approach to things that actually work. Like vaccines.
Tara Palmeri
Yeah. What do you think is of all of the things that he's put out there into the world, what is the most dangerous?
Dr. Mike
I think removing the vaccines is the quickest negative impact that we're going to see. I think also decimating the research community within the United States is going to take decades to put back in place. Labs have closed down that take years to put back in place. Brilliant scientists have left the United States. We always talk about this brain dump. I personally know of several researchers that have either retired or left to practice in other countries. This is a disaster for us. I mean we had research funding, a potential vaccine to prevent cancer, MRNA vaccines were being tested for pancreatic cancer prevention, all of these cancers that we don't have good treatments for, the cancers that have terrible five year survival rates. And instead of investing money into that or investing into Kevin Hall's lab, metabolic lab, where we're learning about ultra processed foods, how we can perhaps make ultra processed foods healthier, how we can limit the amount of consumption of those foods, find pharmaceuticals to make us not have the negative impacts of those foods. They're shut down, we don't have the funding for them. Budgets are being slashed. I mean, the most embarrassing part of Secretary Kennedy's reign as HHS is this. He's an environmental lawyer that fights for the environment and yet we fired the entire entire scientific branch of the EPA. We've cut funding, $15 million for PFAS research on farmland. The things that he was talking about as targets for improving, he's not touching, he is not improving. In fact, he's only harming. And some people have said, well, in these debates, especially that I've had, well, since we're doing so bad as a country, maybe it's better to wipe the slate clean and start over. Well, okay, if he was doing that, I could at least grade him on his effort. But he's not, he's Just cutting programs willy nilly and not making any kind of improvements to our health care system outside of removing some red dye or some specific ingredient out of Skittles. That doesn't change anything.
Tara Palmeri
I was just going to ask you if he's done anything that you're happy with, but it doesn't sound like it.
Dr. Mike
I mean, some people say that because he's doing pull ups and stuff, he's encouraging people to exercise and I encourage people to exercise all the time. I would love for him to have that influence as not HHS secretary and perhaps just as a famous celebrity instead.
Tara Palmeri
Yeah, yeah. So I want to ask you in this final lightning round, if you could debunk one medical myth right now, what would it be and why?
Dr. Mike
Hmm. I would go and say that there is this natural fallacy that exists among not just the Maha supporters, but more broadly in the United States, that there are natural ways of treating conditions that doctors are not privy to and that natural always means safe. First of all, natural does not always mean safe. Things that are natural can absolutely be problematic. Arsenic, cyanide, natural, incredibly deadly. Take too much vitamin A, huge problem, huge toxicity. In fact, that holds true for vitamins. D, E, K, A. These are fat soluble vitamins that can build up in your fat stores and become toxic. Doctors frequently push or recommend as first line treatments for many conditions unless there's something scary going on. Acutely. Lifestyle modifications, getting your sleep, becoming more active through aerobic and resistance training. Getting people to eat a whole food, fruit and vegetable rich diet. Improving the amount of fiber they're consuming. Getting people to make these changes is hard. And that's the most difficult part about being a physician. I have yet to see one recommendation or one change from Secretary Kennedy's office that has made that easier for me as a doctor or easier for my patients to achieve. He did not give them money to use for gyms. He did not make it more accessible to walk on streets. There is nothing that he's doing that's making us healthier at scale, only exposing us to future communicable diseases and potentially the loss of cures and prevention from the research dollars that he's taken away.
Tara Palmeri
Wow, that was a lot to take in.
Dr. Mike
I wish I could say something positive just to make it not so.
Tara Palmeri
No, no, no. Let's leave on like a positive note. Okay. So obviously the medical community took a big hit from COVID But moving forward, what would you say is the path forward for them? I mean, you said communication, use social media, but like how do you think that they need to address this and move forward. Social media, like, what do you, what do you tell a doctor who's, you know, maybe they've been, they're in their 50s, 60s, they're not social media stars. They're. They just have a few clients. I mean, I know it's, it's really hard work. You know, I don't think a lot of people even want to go to medical school anymore. I have a doctor in my family and it's, it's expensive, it's a lot of work. Like, how do you get these people to face the world after has been sort of a loss of trust against the whole business. I mean, we, we have the same feeling in journalism. Like, just look at how they're getting beat up by Trump every day on tv and you're in. People now have this assumption that journalists are liars and you can't trust them because they conflate them with pundits. They don't know the difference.
Dr. Mike
Yeah, it's, it's definitely a scary time for anyone entering the field. I will say that I spent quite a bit of time teaching residents where I work at Atlantic Health Overlook Medical center, and they're more motivated than ever when I go speak at pre med or medical institutions. They're excited. They want to take on this challenge. They are trying to learn from the better communicators of our era to not repeat the mistakes of the past. And I think that actually inspires me to keep going. So my hope is that young doctors of the future will see my content and the content that we've created with my team and figure out how to do it better, how to be more effective as a communicator. And on the same side, the older physicians that perhaps aren't going to be making content, they can support or push people to legitimate sources where people can get answers. Gone is the day where people get some sort of brochure to take home because no one will read that. We need to create resources that are engaging. They're going to keep people's attention. Because when I look at my YouTube analytics, I try and track the audience retention to make sure that I'm an effective communicator. And I think we need to think like YouTubers more often in the health.
Tara Palmeri
Yeah, that's interesting. I wondered if you had lost some of your following because you have taken on some political issues because of that.
Dr. Mike
I don't think so. I think that in looking at our analytics over the last decade, the audience has just continued to grow and what's interesting is it's grown even in circles where people disagree with us. At the conclusion of my last jubilee debate, almost all the individuals came over and were grateful for the conversation. They asked to take photos, several of them posted to social media that they learn new things that they're going to incorporate into their daily lives. This isn't made up. These are real examples that have happened and I'm hoping at least by reading the comments section on some of those videos that hope is still out there and that what's happening on X is not representative of what's actually happening day to day on the streets.
Tara Palmeri
Well, thank you. This was great. I appreciate your time and admire your mission. Thank you so much. I appreciate it and would love to have you back on. Hopefully not because of a crisis, but because you've become the anti RFK and you're breaking through in a big way. Because I mean there's, there's gotta be someone that can counter that, that, that information and that message and you know.
Dr. Mike
Yeah, my hope is that it was always going to be one of the major agencies that, that were to do it given the fact that they have funding.
Tara Palmeri
You're a craft.
Dr. Mike
As a family medicine physician, I'm going to fill in that role because we're there for our patients, whether we're, whether they're in the er, homebound, hospice, er. We go everywhere. So now social media is that new.
Tara Palmeri
Cool. Well, thanks so much for your time and appreciate your work.
Dr. Mike
Thank you so much. Appreciate you. Talk soon.
Tara Palmeri
That was another episode of the Tara Palmeri Show. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you like this show, please follow subscribe Rate Share it with all your friends. Leave a comment I want to hear what you thought about that episode. Of course, if you want to support my journalism and get my exclusive reports straight to your inbox, then go to tarapalmieri.com that's T A R A P A L m e r I.com and sign up for the Red Letter. It is how you can get all my great reporting and support my independent journalism. I want to thank my producer, Eric Abenate, Abby Baker who produced this show and did research and social media, Adam Stewart on the graphics and Dan Rosen, my manager. See you again this week.
Date: January 7, 2026
Host: Tara Palmeri
Guest: Dr. Mike Varshavski (“Dr. Mike”), Board Certified Family Physician & Medical Communicator
This episode features Dr. Mike Varshavski, a prominent physician and YouTube educator, discussing his mission to tackle medical misinformation in the public square—especially misinformation proliferating from high-profile figures like Secretary RFK Jr. and the so-called MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) movement. Tara Palmeri and Dr. Mike dig into the decline of trust in public health institutions, the politicization of healthcare, RFK Jr.'s controversial policy moves, and how doctors and journalists alike should rethink communication in the social media era.
Useful for listeners:
This episode is essential for understanding both the urgency and complexity of fighting misinformation in the health policy sphere, the necessity for professionals to engage more authentically online, and the real-world stakes of policy decisions like those enacted by RFK Jr.'s administration.