Doctor Friends is a friendly Youtube platform tackling medical myths. Photo by Shen Yu-yan.
Doctor Friends is a friendly Youtube platform tackling medical myths. Photo by Shen Yu-yan.

Doctor Friends is a YouTube channel consisting of three doctors from mental health medicine, internal medicine and ENT(Ear- Nose-Throat) departments respectively. The channel covers various contents involving tackling wrong medical information and movie reviews from a medical perspective. The team has garnered over 648 thousand subscribers as of March of 2021. Ewha Voice sat down with Doctor Oh Jin-seung, a psychiatrist of the group, to hear more about their story as their audience is getting bigger.

 

“Our foremost priority is to remind ourselves to make sure we do not portray any diseases as comical,” Oh said.

 

Oh said there are people who are actually suffering because of the disease, and no disease should ever be considered lightly.

 

When asked what makes a good doctor, surprisingly, Oh replied that knowing the current trends, such as newly-coined and trendy words that the majority of young people use, would help one become a good doctor to patients.

 

“So many new words that pop up every day, especially online,” Oh said. “A lot of young people these days shorten mouthful words and because these terms spread so fast online, some doctors find it difficult keeping up with the trend. However, if the doctor keeps having these language barriers or generational gaps with younger patients, patients will immediately feel disconnected from the doctor. The doctor’s role is to make patients feel comfortable. Vice versa, doctors should act flexibly and treat older patients with slower and louder speech.”

 

Regarding the secret to Doctor Friends’ success, Oh answered that it is thanks to their diverse group of specialists.

 

“A lot of foreigners visit Korea and are shocked to learn how well constructed the Korean medical system is for raising medical specialists in respective fields,” Oh said. “For instance, I have studied six years as a medical student and one year as a resident and from then, I have been only studying mental health.”

 

There are perks of this, but there are downsides as well. As the year goes on, one starts to lose knowledge of other medical fields.

 

“When we are talking about each other’s main fields, we become viewers at the same time and ask questions that an average person with limited medical knowledge would ask,” Oh said. “We are doctors but viewers at the same time. We’re not acting when we ask medical questions to each other. I think the genuineness made the content more relatable. I don’t think we would have been this successful if we were specialists in all the same fields.”

 

Lastly, when asked what Oh would like to share with Ewha Voice readers, he reminded that there are so many reasons for those in their 20s and 30s to feel frustrated, such as lack of job opportunities and the pandemic situation. In fact, there is research that proves that COVID-19 has negatively affected women more than it did to men as they were more likely to be fired from their job.

 

“Don’t compare yourself with anyone else but compare yourself with your past self and record how much you have grown since then,” Oh said.

 

Doctor Friends upload videos every Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday at 9 p.m. on YouTube.

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