[00:00:00] Christine Ko: Welcome back to SEE HEAR FEEL. Today, I have the pleasure of conversing with Dr. Kevin Pho. Dr. Kevin Pho, MD founded KevinMD in 2004. KevinMD has become the web's leading platform where physicians, advanced practitioners, nurses, medical students, patients, and anyone else with an interest in healthcare can share insights and stories. KevinMD has over 3 million monthly page views and has been cited in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. Dr. Pho is a board-certified internal medicine physician and acclaimed keynote speaker, host of The Podcast by KevinMD, and co-author of the book Establishing, and Protecting Your Online Reputation: A Social Media Guide for Physicians and Medical Practices, and a link to that will be in the show notes. He attended Boston University School of Medicine and currently practices medicine in Nashua, New Hampshire. Welcome to Kevin.
[00:00:50] Kevin Pho: Christine, thank you so much for having me.
[00:00:52] Christine Ko: Given all these amazing things that you're doing, if you could tell something about yourself that could make you more relatable to the listeners?
[00:01:01] Kevin Pho: Absolutely. Like your intro said, I'm an internal medicine physician. I practice in Nashua, New Hampshire. I just celebrated my 20th year anniversary, ended up getting an air fryer for working in one place, which is pretty rare because this was my first job out of residency. And I know a lot of residents don't necessarily stay with their job. So I say to this only job for 20 years, I'm getting my air fryer soon. So I'm super, super excited about that.
[00:01:24] Christine Ko: Congratulations. Especially nowadays, most people, most doctors, change jobs at least twice, three, four times in the first couple years. So you have a lot of staying power.
[00:01:36] Kevin Pho: I like to stay with one thing, and I was really lucky that I was in a practice where people took care of me; the people were great. And my advice to anyone going into a practice is really: look beyond the dollars, look beyond numbers. You have to look at the people because they really make and break you and can determine whether you stay in a practice or not.
[00:01:55] Christine Ko: I think that's great advice. Why did you start KevinMD?
[00:01:57] Kevin Pho: So I started Kevin MD, this was back in 2004, so that was almost 20 years ago. And at that time there weren't very many clinicians on social media, let alone clinicians who had blogs. So I did not have any type of business plan going in. I did not anticipate it growing to what it was today. One of my family members told me, you have a lot of opinions about the medical system, you should start a blog. And at that time I had no idea what a blog was, and I started just writing and everyone can start one. You didn't really need any upfront money. It was so easy to start just a site on a web where you could publish anything. And I think that the point where it started resonating with me was one day I went into the exam room, and that patient in the exam room said, "Dr. Pho, I read your blog this morning, and I was super comforted about what you had to say. I'm glad that you said what you did. I'm just really happy to have read your opinion." And that's the point where I realized that we can talk to patients outside of the exam room; we can influence patients outside of the exam room. So rather than one to one, and of course with social media, you can do one to many. And I think that's tremendously important because as we all know, patients get the majority of their medical information, not necessarily in a doctor's office, but online on Google, on Facebook, on YouTube, on all these social media sites. And if physicians don't take that initiative to go online, to either be a source of reputable health information, or to clear up all that information, someone else could. And it could be politicians, it could be pseudo practitioners. It could be purveyors of false information.
[00:03:35] So over the next 20 years or so Kevin MD survey has grown beyond the blog. It's now like you said, on a podcast, on Facebook and Twitter; and it's really a platform where I share the stories of not just physicians or mainly physicians, but also advanced practice practitioners, medical students, and nurses, just really people all across the spectrum of healthcare, where they don't necessarily have that large following or platform, but their stories are no less important. They can use my site to really share stories that really deserve to be heard, to clear up misinformation, especially with COVID, the virus, and the vaccine. And I think that it's been so gratifying, not only to meet people like yourself and talk to them, but really read their stories, and share and amplify their voice, and that information.
[00:04:24] Christine Ko: Your explanation really resonates with me. What has surprised you most in your journey with KevinMD?
[00:04:29] Kevin Pho: The fact that people continue to be interested in what this platform has to say. There are certainly posts that have resonated with hundreds of thousands of shares and views. After 20 years, I think that the mission that I started out with in terms of being a platform and a voice has certainly just only snowballed and grown. I think it's important for physicians and other healthcare professionals to just get their voices heard on a platform that is physician run, where I can certainly run with the narratives that are important, not only to me, but from the medical profession. Of my guest authors, [one] said that KevinMD was "a safe space for physicians". And I thought to myself, why do we need a safe space for physicians? I think that we've seen over, especially over the last few years, that a lot of healthcare professionals have come across a lot of criticism when it comes to COVID. In extreme cases, they even come under attack, physically assaulted, and I think it is important to have that area where we can safely share our stories. In order for us to change our profession, we need to get these stories out. We need the decision makers who make policy, who make laws, know about what's going on behind the scenes. Having that platform where I can make a small bit of difference, where I can amplify those voices, and lead, hopefully, to positive change within the profession has been tremendously important and surprising to me.
[00:05:50] Christine Ko: Definitely there has been overt discrimination and sometimes trauma to physicians and other healthcare practitioners. Especially at this point in the pandemic, people are burning out, but I think we only keep doing it because we think that it's more of a calling than a job. So a lot of my podcast focuses on things like emotional intelligence, the growth mindset, deliberate practice. These concepts: I don't think they're soft skills; I actually think they're very hard skills, at least for me. But they're things that I didn't learn about in medical school or college, actually, to my detriment. I was wondering if any of those things have played a role in KevinMD or the things that you have been doing?
[00:06:38] Kevin Pho: So I think that's a fantastic question. They've absolutely played a role in the growth and resonance of KevinMD. When you talk about the growth mindset, where one doesn't see failure as a way to describe oneself but use it as a springboard to move forward. I think that's really helped KevinMD to be where it is today. If I let failure stop what I was doing with KevinMD, then it probably wouldn't last as long as it did. This unknown intersection between social media and healthcare: there's no playbook, there's no rule book. There aren't really any mentors that I can follow. A lot of it is this experimentation, and if it works great, and if it doesn't, then you just simply learn from it and move on. And there just has to be that continuous learning cycle based on mistakes and failures. And I've made plenty of mistakes along the way. Certainly in this environment where we live in such a divisive society and healthcare, there's no shortage of divisive and political issues. I think is certainly important to navigate. I've learned as an editor, what would generate controversy? You have to listen to your audience. And that helps you grow and move forward in terms of how to become a better editor, how to shape those narratives that you want to shape. You learn on to fly. These aren't skills that you necessarily learn in medical school.
[00:07:57] You mentioned things like emotional intelligence and developing empathy with your audience. And I think that is something that I've tried to work on, especially when you talk about issues where 50% of the country may disagree with an author, may disagree with you. And how do you handle that? You have to understand people who disagree with you. Where are they coming from?
[00:08:17] You have to empathize with their situation as well. For me as a person, I always believe that the solutions to the biggest problems require options from both sides of the political aisle. You talk about any issue in healthcare. There's not a progressive solution. There's not a purely conservative solution. People that you may vehemently disagree with may have a point at times. And sometimes they may have ideas that you may not have thought of, and you have to be accepting of those ideas. If you are wrong, and if you make a mistake, you have to be okay to own up to that mistake. You have to be open about it. So these are all things that I've worked on.
[00:08:57] Christine Ko: It's hard for me to imagine, seeing KevinMD so successful now, that you experienced failures and mistakes. It surprised me to hear you say that.
[00:09:08] Kevin Pho: One of the biggest things is that if you're perfect right off the box, if it comes out perfectly without any rough edges, then you probably started too late. So that's one piece of advice that I advise any healthcare professional who wants to get their voice heard and wants to be heard in this social media space. Just start, and it doesn't have to be perfect. And you'll learn along the way and use those mistakes and failures to strengthen your content and strengthen your voice because that's the best way to learn.
[00:09:37] Christine Ko: Yeah. I love it. Do you have any final thoughts?
[00:09:40] Kevin Pho: I just feel so passionately about Healthcare professionals is getting their voice out there and we have so many tools to do so we have this podcast and I'm talking to you here. We have course blogs and Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube. There's so many ways of getting our voices out, and it's so important, especially now when there's so many attacks and obstacles, that's preventing our profession from growing. We can't be silent. We need to influence those decision makers. We need to influence those policy makers, and the only way to do so is to share those stories. Because if we don't take control of our profession, someone else is going to make those decisions for us. And they may not have necessarily our best interests at heart. So get online, share a voice, don't be afraid, and really advocate for our profession.
[00:10:24] Christine Ko: Thank you. Thank you for spending the time. I really appreciate it.
[00:10:27] Kevin Pho: Christine, thank you so much.