Doctors are moving out of their clinics and taking over the digital world. Many physicians are engaging in digital media, sharing their expertise and opinions on platforms such as Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. But little is known on how doctors are mediating health research on social media.

Noha Atef, a postdoctoral fellow at the ScholCommLab, led a series of qualitative studies on doctors who create video blogs (or vlogs) on YouTube. Alongside lab members Alice Fleerackers and Juan Pablo Alperin, they explored why Egyptian doctors use vlogs, how they present themselves online, and what makes health vlogging rewarding to them.

In this interview, we ask Noha about how she got involved in the research, unexpected findings from her work, and how her studies help inform the field of health communication.

Q1. What got you interested in studying how doctors vlog?

During the pandemic, many people recorded and shared vlogs of their health care routines—from skincare to diets—on social media. I noticed these vlogs received thousands of views, even if the health advice was misinformed or lacked quality evidence. This aroused my curiosity to verify the content of viral health vlogs. I started following physician vloggers, including dermatologists, dietitians, and pharmacists, who I perceived to be more reliable sources of health information when compared to civilians. 

When I started my research fellowship at the ScholCommLab, there was ongoing research about journalism and health communication. I wanted to expand on the work by focusing on “citizen journalists,” particularly Egyptian doctors on social media who discuss health information. My studies on doctors who vlog explored the people behind the videos—why physicians use (and what they gain from) vlogging, how they present themselves online, and how they discuss and present research in these videos.

Q2. Why do doctors make YouTube videos?

While conducting the interviews, participants told me about their busy schedules and how their time translates into money. It also made me wonder why they would allocate time to make their vlogs, growing their YouTube channels and social media accounts.
“Uses and Gratification Theory” was helpful to answer these questions and explore the benefits that physicians get from health vlogging. In this preprint study, we learned that participants created vlogs to achieve self-focused goals (e.g., answering patients’ recurring questions to save time in the clinic, promoting themselves) as well as society-focused goals (e.g., spreading medical awareness, addressing cultural and social issues related to health and wellbeing).

Q3. How did the doctors present themselves on their vlogs?

We used “Goffman’s Theory of Presentation of Self” to understand what face doctors wear on their blogs. Goffman proposes that humans are actors who wear “faces” and act differently according to what would keep you accepted in the community you present in. For example, the “face” we wear at work may not be the same we wear with friends or at home.

In this preprint study (forthcoming in the International Journal of Communication), we found that our participants embodied the characteristics of two types of people: health professionals and influencers (as they were popular vloggers, some of them with millions of followers). We found that participants wore multiple faces during their vlogs, emphasizing four traits: approachable, knowledgeable, pedagogical, and popular. Their self-presentation appeared to be a negotiation between two roles: part influencer, or social media content creator, and part doctor, or health service provider.  

Q4. What was your most surprising finding?

My most surprising, and important, finding (now available in a preprint study, currently under review) was that physician vloggers scarcely referred to medical research in their videos. We found that these vloggers only cited academic research in the videos about medical controversies, new treatments, misinformation, or common medical mistakes.

Many of the doctors felt that talking “scientifically” could be detrimental to their audience, if the people cannot decode the science. They believed their audiences would not understand the evidence due to their low educational status, weak research skills, and language barriers (as most medical research is published in English rather than Arabic). 

These findings highlight the challenges of communicating science in societies with a low level of education. In these settings, science communicators—including physician vloggers—should consider focusing on simplifying the research, translating and connecting evidence-based information to the cultural context, rather than solely relying on citations.

Q5. What did you gain from using mixed method approaches to address your research questions?

Prior to conducting the focus groups, we asked 200+ Arab social media users about how they select the sources of their health information online. We used this information to generate graphs and shared them with the health vloggers to start a discussion about their audience. This led to insightful discussions with participants, allowing them to go deeper and share their observations on how their audience interacts with their content. I also believe in the power of interviews. I can create depth in them, especially with sharing the language and culture of the participants (as I am Egyptian, too).

Q6. What kind of response have you received on your findings from doctors?

The twelve doctors who participated in the study really enjoyed the findings from each of the papers. One of the participants is now in academic research and particularly liked how the research was conducted with Egyptian health professional vloggers. According to the participant, there were many discussions in their research institution about the use of social media for medical awareness. My work may provide some insight into this phenomenon, from an Egyptian context. 

Q7. Why is your research important?

My research is one of the first projects to investigate Arab health vloggers. It adds a qualitative perspective to a quantitative-dominated research area, identifying the active role participants played as both sources of data and critical reviewers of the preliminary results. The work also fills knowledge gaps in the science communication with respect to health influencers and their self-presentation, the benefits of vlogging to the vloggers and, maybe most importantly, the relevance of citing scientific evidence.

Q8. What’s next for you or your work? What are some possible real world applications? 

I hope that further studies will be carried out on the ethics of vlogging health and how they are influenced by cultural and legal contexts. I’d also like to see more qualitative research and ethnography studies on health vlogging. I’m very much interested in mixed-method research that tracks the virality of misinformation, which may inform how and when health vlogs get their most views.

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