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189: Medical Mythbuster Joel Bervell explains why representation matters — in medicine and media

What motivates Joel Bervell, a.k.a. the Medical Mythbuster, to create social media content addressing racial disparities, the hidden history of medicine, and biases in healthcare? 

He’s seen how it can literally save lives.

A year after Bervell posted a video about disparities in pulse oximeters for Black patients, a man reached out to share that during the pandemic, he had reported to the hospital with shortness of breath, a fever and COVID symptoms. The pulse oximeter reported 100% oxygen saturation, so he was told to go home.

“But he felt horrible, and he had recently seen my video” showing pulse oximeters can report falsely high oxygen readings in Black patients, Bevell says. “And so he told the doctors.. I want to stay here at the hospital. Is that okay?”

The doctors let him stay, and the man ended up crashing the night, ending up in the ICU with intubation. He’s grateful he survived, and later reached out to Bervell to say, “because of your video, I felt confident being able to say, ‘I don't know if this is accurate for me, I don't feel well. I want to stay.’”

Bervell says this is why he creates videos like these, to help people understand medical issues “so they can feel confident to let their needs be known” to health care providers.

Hear more on this story and the latest adventures of the Medical Mythbuster Joel Bervell, who joined Movement Is Life’s summit as a closing plenary speaker, and spoke with Board member Dr. Erick Santos for this podcast episode.

Never miss an episode – be sure to subscribe to The Health Disparities podcast from Movement Is Life on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

 

The transcript from today’s episode has been lightly edited for clarity.

 

Joel Bervell: Having a higher GFR means that Black people were less likely to get access to kidney transplants, less likely to get diagnosed with chronic kidney disease, less likely to get access to kidney specialists. So I'd been posting videos about this, and a woman reached out to me and shared that she'd been following me, sharing all my videos with her sister, who had stage four chronic kidney disease, and that because of my video, her sister was able to move up five years on the kidney transplant list by showing it to her doctor. And earlier this year, in March, I was actually on the Kelly Clarkson show, and they surprised me by bringing a niece on. I didn't know she was going to be there. They surprised me at the last minute, which was pretty incredible to actually get to meet the woman who had seen my video in the first place on stage, and her sister couldn't be there. But the reason why is because, literally, the day before, she'd just gotten her kidney transplant, and so she was recovering, those are stories that bring the digital impact kind of to real life.

 

Dr. Erick Santos: You're listening to the Health Disparities podcast from Movement Is Life. It's being recorded live and in person at the Movement Is Life's annual health equity summit. My name is Dr. Erick Santos, a member of the Board of Movement Is Life. And I'm an orthopedic surgeon and also practices as a physician engineer consultant for Biodynamic Research Corporation, but also have a clinical practice in McAllen, Texas. Have a very special guest today, Mr. Joel Bervell. He's our Medical Mythbuster. He's a medical student that's about to graduate very soon and wants to go into orthopedic surgery. He gave a fantastic closing plenary session at the summit today, and I'm going to lead with thanking him for coming here and to kind of talk about his background and what made him interested in becoming a Medical Mythbuster.

 

Bervell: Absolutely, thank you so much for having me, Dr Santos.

 

Santos: So what got you interested in being a medical myth buster? How did you get interested in health equity and in combating health disparities?

 

Bervell: Absolutely, I always say that for me, it's personal. This all started with my family growing up. I am from an immigrant family, both my parents from Ghana, West Africa, and education was always number one for everything that we did for much of my childhood. My parents wanted to make sure that my siblings and I had the best education, and as such, they were working a lot. So my grandma, who was from Ghana, didn't speak any English, came to the United States to take care of my siblings and I, and she, I was a bad kid. I will say I was always kind of stealing food before I was supposed to be eating it or not finishing all my food. But grandma was one of my favorite people. When we were in sixth grade, we were finally old enough to take care of ourselves, in terms of being able to, not necessarily have to, having to have a babysitter anymore. 

 

And grandma went back to Ghana, but unfortunately, within the year, she passed away from malaria, and I found out later on that part of the reason why she passed away was because of delays in care that she'd been told to bring her own IV tubing because she was in a rural clinic in Ghana and they didn't have access to it. For me, that was the earliest moment where I started asking myself, How do these disparities exist? Albeit at that point, it was on a global perspective. I wondered whether, if she'd been in the United States, would she be here, still today, with us. And I think that was the earliest memory for me of understanding how I became interested in health equity and medicine as a whole. And as I went to middle school, elementary school, high school, and then college, I continued to dive into medicine. As a freshman in high school, I was doing things like working at a Children's Hospital, but also at the same time, working at places like Housing Hope, which was an affordable housing unit. And I got to see the intersections of both health but also housing. All these what we call the social determinants of health, and how they interacted at a very young age, when I went to college, I took a ton of classes that were looking at the intersections between these even more, whether it was about health policy or media and medicine, and I think all these things were preparing me to become the medical myth buster that I am today, in a way that didn't even realize it. 

 

And so when I got to medical school. I'm currently at Washington State University. I was a part of the third class of students originally, and so there'd only been two classes before. It's a relatively new school. Part of the reason why I chose it was I'm from the Seattle, Washington, area, and I wanted to be back closer to home, but also I did realize that I'd be one of the first and myself and one other student were the first two Black students at my medical school, and I was thinking a lot about what it meant to be one of the first what it meant to leave a legacy. When the COVID pandemic hit, when I was still in my first year of medical school, and during the COVID pandemic, I kept hearing things like that Black patients are more likely to get COVID. We never really dove into the reasons why we didn't connect it to social determinants of health, redlining history, segregation instead, we just left it as black people and molecular COVID And it never really made sense why we didn't dive deeper into those conversations. 

 

And so I started to take to TikTok, of all places, to talk about the questions that I had that I wished we were getting answered in our classes, but weren't getting answered, and really, one of the first videos that blew up that became me being the Medical Mythbuster was about this device called a pulse oximeter. Pulse oximeters are devices that go on our finger, and they measure our blood oxygen saturation level. Unfortunately, during December 2020, I was on Instagram, scrolling through one of my friends had shared a story that had the New England Journal of Medicine article, and the article showed that black patients were three times as likely to have overestimated inaccurate oxygen saturation levels when compared to other patients. And I was shocked, because even though I'd gone through at this point, it's been a year in medical school, I had never heard about this my pulmonology classes, in any of my classes, and I did what any Gen Z/Millennial, I call myself a Zillennial, would do, and I made a TikTok about it. At the time TikToks could only be 30 seconds, and so I had to compress all this information to 30 seconds and post it. And I did, and I basically said, What does racial bias in medicine look like? This is a pulse oximeter. And I kind of went through and I described why it was significant that there's this disparity. Within 24 hours, it had over half a million views, and there was doctors and nurses and patients asking, well, doctors to nurses saying, I didn't realize this disparity existed, and I use this every single day, and patients asking, Is this what happened to myself or to my loved one, and I realized that talking about these disparities, not so much from the implicit bias perspective, but from the systemic bias perspective, was really important, because there are all these disparities that are built into our system.

 

Because unfortunately, the foundation of medicine has never been equitable, that there was race involved, there was racism involved in it as well. And these things get passed on into our current system. And I think at the end of that year, I got an award from TikTok. I was TikTok's voice of change in 2021 and they put out this article and called me the Medical Mythbuster. And so after that, I kind of ran with it and said, That's a cool name. I guess that is what I'm doing. I'm busting medical myths when it comes specifically to race, gender, disabilities, all these types of how our identities are often used in medicine in ways that don't make sense. That's what I'm trying to myth bust right now, and specifically trying to root out biases that we don't even realize we've learned and are perpetuating and understanding how those get built into a system.

 

Santos: You are a fantastic communicator. I think I can just see, you know, your audience with your videos, just, you know, really getting that information. I, you know, I had a question, you know. I mean, looks like you're interested in orthopedic surgery, yeah. How do you see, you know your role, if you go into residency and then become an orthopedic surgeon in, in I guess, combating those disparities. 

 

Bervell: Absolutely. I love that question, because it's something I ask myself all the time, but I think it relates to even how I got interested in orthopedics in the first place. So I became first interested in orthopedic surgery, as I'd say, junior in college, and part of the reason why was I had been doing this summer program called the Institute for Responsible citizenship that was based in Washington, DC. The institute gives 12 Black men two summers in Washington, DC, and provides us with internships at different places. My first summer, I worked at the Urban Institute. It's a think tank, and so I was doing health policy research, specifically looking at the Affordable Care Act, Medicare, Medicaid, What does it mean to expand Medicaid on the state level? How does that increase access for low income individuals to care? 

 

My second summer, I didn't know what to do, and so they originally wanted to put me at a head hunting talent firm. And I said, I do not want to do that. I want something that's medicine related. And so they found me this internship at Howard University Hospital, and it was with Dr. Terry Thompson at Howard University in orthopedics. And I had no idea what orthopedics was at the time, but I said, this sounds cool. Let me go. And I spent the next eight to 10 weeks shadowing the residents and the physicians being in the surgeries, not scrubbing in, but getting to watch it, and really understanding that there's this whole world of orthopedics that I'd never heard about before as a college student, but loved. What I loved about it was the idea that it wasn't necessarily life saving, but it was quality of life saving that you could go in with someone that was having shoulder pain, hip pain, and fix them. But the same time, I saw disparities within access to that for patients, patients that had had arthritis for a long time but didn't want to come to the hospital because they didn't have the means to be able to actually pay for a clinic visit, younger kids who maybe had fractured something, but never came to the hospital because they were worried about having to pay for it because they didn't have insurance. And I saw in real time the conversations that the doctors were having, Dr. Terry Thompson, Dr. Wilson and others with patients and how they interacted with them. And I loved it. I loved the idea that as a doctor, you were able to dive into these hard conversations with patients and provide them a better outlet that could help save their life. 

 

And so for me, I think that was a big part of understanding that while orthopedics doesn't seem like a natural kind of connection to the health disparities I talk about that in every single conversation I have those opportunities, there's also the I learned later on, the fact that orthopedics is the least diverse specialty right now in medicine. I can't remember the exact number, but I think it's less than 2% of all orthos positions are black specifically. And when you look at just overall, the numbers when it comes to gender and racial breakdown in other places is just as not, not diverse as well. And so that was something that got me interested in it as well. I always kind of love challenges, and I love being able to open spaces for the next generation. And I was interested in why it was not diverse, and understanding, how can we begin to diversify it? When I was at Howard, one of the residents, Alexis Gaskin, Dr. Alexis Gaskin, actually told me to apply for Nth Dimensions when I became a med student, and so this was three years before I was starting medical school, but when I came to medical school, I remembered that advice, and I applied for Nth Dimensions and got in, and that was something that further solidified my interest in in in orthopedics, and specifically mentoring and mentorship and thinking about, how can you use that in order to be not just a mentor but an advocate and a sponsor for the next generation.

 

Santos: Yeah, I've been a preceptor for Nth Dimensions for the last 10 years, my first mentee is actually now practicing as a total joint surgeon in Puerto Rico. And so, you know, it does make a huge difference, and we really need that, you know, to improve the diversity in orthopedics. You know, maybe we can talk for a moment about, why is it important to have diversity in medicine and orthopedics? I even saw that you used one of our that vicious cycle slide with the social determinants of health. That's actually a Movement Is Life slide, you know, when we were part of Zimmer Biomet. But, you know, I think it's really important. I want you to talk a little bit about why that's important to have diversity in medicine.

 

Bervell: Yeah, I simplify it by saying that the importance for having diverse physicians is because we serve a diverse workforce, like when, when you have a physician that looks like you or comes in the same community as you, you are more likely, and studies show this to adhere to medication, to listen to advice, to understand resources. And that can be for a host of reasons, whether it's understanding where a community is from and the needs that are within there, whether it's being able to see someone that looks like you and you know that you can trust because of that, or whether it's understanding the difficulties of what it takes to come to the hospital. And so for me, having a diverse workforce is important because our lived experiences are so diverse if we're not representing that we don't have people within the system that we can learn from. I also think about it from the peer to peer aspect as well. A lot of my peers that were in medical school, one of my best friends, I'll say his name, his name's Cameron. I remember, like, first day of medical school, we're driving to school together. I put on my normal music. It was Beyonce, and he had never heard of Beyonce before. And I was like, how is that possible? Queen B, the Queen B, exactly. And, like, I think of it as a metaphor, where, if you aren't exposed to people that listen to different music, that come from different lived experiences in medical school, in the place that you're working, you can't understand your patients, because these are patients coming in with different life experiences, not just from music, but from all aspects of life, and you need to be able to understand that. 

 

So having diversity is important, both from the perspective of learning from each other, from understanding your patients, but also from understanding what needs to be done in order to understand live experiences. Then the vicious cycle that you talked about this slide I shared, I love that slide because it shows how at the center of everything is movement, but also how social determinants of health impact that movement. If you have something like chronic kidney disease, which can be debilitating, and you're on dialysis all the time, having to get your kidneys filtered out, or your blood filtered out, you are not able to be moving. That can lead to joint pain, that can lead to increased arthritis that can lead to obesity, which is connected to 200 other chronic conditions as well. And so movement, I love the title Movement Is Life as well, says everything you need to know about it, right? Movement, literally, is life. And when these chronic conditions, or just even acute conditions, happen that prevent you from being able to move, you are not able to live your life to the fullest. And so I think that's for me, how it connects to orthopedics with those disparities, but also even beyond understanding why diversity is necessary.

 

Santos: You know, I really enjoyed your talk, and especially, you know, the stories you gave of the people who saw your videos who really affected their lives. Can you share one of those with us?

 

Bervell: Yeah, I'll share one that I didn't share actually on stage. It's about the pulse oximeter. So I mentioned earlier about the pulse oximeter and how there's this disparity about I think it was a year later, after I posted that video, initially, someone reached out to me on LinkedIn. His name is Ola seni, and he reached out and told me that he had this very cryptic message that he said, your pulse oximeter video saved my life. That was it. I immediately texted him back or messaged him back. I was like, Okay, what do you mean? Let's hop on a call. So we hopped on a Zoom. I mean, he told me this story of how, during the COVID pandemic, he got to the hospital. He'd been having shortness of breath, fevers, COVID symptoms, got to the hospital. Doctors kind of took his pulse ox, saw that he had 100% oxygen saturation, and said, You're young. You're a young, healthy guy. Go home. But he felt horrible, and he had recently seen my video, and so he told the doctors, you know, I saw this video that shows that this device doesn't work really well. I want to stay here at the hospital. Is that okay? Doctors were like, whatever. Like, go ahead. You can stay here. 

 

He ended up crashing that night, having to go to the ICU, being intubated. And before he was intubated, his they brought him an iPad to talk to his wife and his newborn child, as if he might not survive. He thankfully did survive, but he says that he feels like if he hadn't stayed at the hospital, he might not be here today. And he literally told me, because of your video, I felt confident being able to say, I don't know if this is accurate. For me, I don't feel well. I want to stay and for me, that's why I create these videos in the first place, to try and add some common language between a patient so they can feel confident to let their needs be known. 

 

One of the other stories I share is about dermatology, and specifically about how in medical school, we don't often learn what skin conditions look like on darker skin tones. And I talk a lot about the ABCDEs of melanoma, and specifically one type of melanoma that's more common in people of African and Asian ancestry, it can present on the nail beds, on the palms, on the soles of your feet. 

 

I posted that video and had a woman reach out. Her name is Lauren, and she told me that because of my video, she went to the doctor, got her mole biopsy that she had that she didn't have for a long time. It looked like one of the pictures I showed. It turned out to be precancerous until she got it removed. Another example of how you give information to people and they will act on it if they have it. The last example I'll give is about the GFR, or glomerular filtration rate. GFR is a measure of how well our kidneys work. For decades, there's been a racial correction for the GFR that says that if you're black and only if you're Black, you have a higher level of kidney functioning than any other race just because of your race. That never really made sense to me, and thankfully, that equation was changed, and so I made videos about how, even before it was changed, how it should be changed. In 2021 race was removed from the equation. And in 2023 the organ procurement and transplantation network said, if you've had this race based equation used, we're going to go back and retrospectively look and correct your potential wait times. Having a higher GFR means that Black people are less likely to get access to kidney transplants, less likely to get diagnosed with chronic kidney disease, less likely to get access to kidney specialists. So I'd been posting videos about this, and a woman reached out to me and shared that she'd been following me, sharing all my videos with her sister, who had stage four chronic kidney disease, and that because of my video, her sister was able to move up five years on the kidney transplant list by showing it to her doctor. 

 

And earlier this year, in March, I was actually on the Kelly Clarkson show, and they surprised me by bringing a niece on. I didn't know she was going to be there. They surprised me at the last minute, which was pretty incredible to actually get to meet the woman who had seen my video in the first place on stage, and her sister couldn't be there. But the reason why is because, literally, the day before, she'd just gotten her kidney transplant, and so she was recovering, like, those are stories that bring the digital impact kind of to real life.

 

Santos: That's a fantastic story. And I, you know, I know you we saw in your presentation also about the history of medicine, about race being a construct, and how faulty research over over decades has led to our this situation. Can you comment about that, what led you to kind of investigate that and and put those videos up?

 

Bervell: Absolutely. I'd always been curious about race. I mean, I think it's impossible not to. When I always say it's a very dark like it's, you look at me and you know, I'm Black, right? And growing up, and in high school, my friends, I always quote this, like, friends would always say things like, Joel, you're an Oreo, meaning that I Black on the outside, but I look white on the inside, according to them. And when I'd ask them why, they would say things like, Well, you're in all AP classes, you're in debate team, or you speak really well, or things like that. And I'd ask, why does that mean that I have to what? Why can a Black person cannot, can't do that? Why is that that you have to say I'm white or acting white to do that? And they'd be like, Oh, that's not what we mean. But when you investigate it, they'd eventually concede and be like, Okay, I guess that is what I'm saying right now. 

 

And I learned to ask the five whys like, why are things like this right now? And one of those Whys I had a question about was about race. My parents from Ghana, as I mentioned, and whenever I would go back to Ghana, the idea of race is so different there, like it does not feel the same in the United States versus when you go to Ghana. And even my parents, I remember they were comments so often about how race is weird in the United States, how they didn't understand these like disparities that existed because for them, everyone in Ghana was Black. There was no such thing as race, if anything, it was colorism or other or socio economic and other things. So these Whys led me to want to understand race in the United States and how race even was formed. And when I started doing more research onto it, you really get down to the people who started race and how it's related, intrinsically to the methods of slavery, but also to specific scientists who defined what race looks like. So Carl Linnaeus was one of the first people who defined race and used these different varieties in order to talk about it. And you can look it up online, but if you look at his chart, they are tracked hand in hand with stereotypes that still to this day exist, stereotypes that impact how medicine is even taught today stereotypes of things like that Black people don't feel pain, which are beliefs that are still held today by medical students, medical residents, even doctors, based on research like a 2016 University of Virginia study. 

 

And so for me, I really began to investigate this, because I feel like I'd been learning my whole life to ask why, and I was never satisfied with the answer of, that's how it is, right? Or that like, especially when I found out, when you when you learn that race is a social construct, through the Human Genome Project, we know that you can't look at someone's genes and figure out exactly what race they are. You can find their ethnicity, their ancestry, but race isn't one of those things. And so I want to investigate that deeper. And I think sharing it online was a powerful because most people had never thought about this in that way. It really disrupted how people thought about race, which is why I think the videos do pretty well. Is because people are commenting things like, how is this true if x, y and z, and then you kind of go down that rabbit hole, exploring each of those things and realizing how all these biases have been built in in ways that really don't make sense.

 

Santos: Yeah, and I loved your examples of looking at Tuskegee study and the story of Henrietta Lacks, and it really and you see it up to this day, of lack of sensitivity and bias. And you know, I'm so glad that you were able to share your story with us. And, and I saw that you have a new TV show coming up for children, The Doctor Is In, can you talk a little bit about that and and what you hope to achieve with that?

 

Bervell: Absolutely, when I was growing up, I loved animation. I still love animation. And one of the earliest times I saw representation for myself on TV was through this TV show called Static Shock. It was about this young animated superhero. And there's one episode I remember where he went to Ghana, and, like, was exploring his roots. And for me, I was like, This is crazy. Like seeing myself kind of like I go to Ghana, right? I'm seeing myself. I'm seeing like, the places that I've gone to in real life, represented here. And I told myself when I one day wanted to have an animated show where I talked about, specifically science and so that's what the doctor is in is really about. It's a mixed reality, animated and live action TV show where myself and little Leland, who's a six year old who loves to go to the doctor, talk about science concepts with our medical supplies, our magical medical supplies. So we have Sammy, the stethoscope, auto, the handbag, and zeta, the X ray. And along with all of them, we talk about what health care issues look like. 

 

So we talk about things like Leland's asthma. We talk about skin conditions too, on darker skin tones, and like not so much getting deep into it, but really showcasing what it can look like. We talk about how food passes through the body, or what a tummy ache is, or how do our bones keep us, or how does an x ray work? These basic science things, which I think will get kids interested in medicine early on. The whole idea isn't necessary to build the next generation of doctors per se, although that would be a great outcome, but to give kids an early exposure to science in a fun way to get them interested. I spent some time before I came to medical school, in between college and medical school, working at an elementary school. I was working with five year olds, and I created a curriculum where I was like, you know, I'm not going to dumb it down. I'm going to actually teach them everything. 

 

And so at the showcase with their parents, we ended up having them walk through, when you eat, what happens to it? And it wasn't like they were just saying, you eat and it goes in your throat, your stomach and out. They were going like, you eat amylase and lipase breaks it down. It passes through your esophagus, first into like, your first part. It's gonna pass through this part of the stomach, this part, this part, then your small intestine, then your large intestine. Here's what happens there. And the parents were sitting in the audience flabbergasted, like, how is my five year old saying these awards that I don't even know? And I realized that all it is is education. The earlier you begin it, if you can, if you can do math at an early age, why can't you learn about the human body? And once you learn those basic concepts, you remember it forever. I. You're able to build on it in the future. So that's really what I hope this show will do, is build the next future people that are interested in science overall.

 

Santos: I saw that you got to meet with Vice President Harris, yeah, and Secretary General Vivek Murthy. Can you tell us about that experience? And in in, you know what? What you got out of it, and you know, some of the the connections you made?

 

Bervell: Absolutely. Yeah, it's funny. Dr Murthy has now become a close friend, just because I've run into him so often in different spaces. But I first met him at South by Southwest. I was speaking on stage about kind of barriers in higher education from the medical standpoint. We also had, we put together a panel with a panel with law, education and then sociology as well, and it was a great conversation. And afterwards, the Surgeon General's team had reached out to see if we could do a video at the time about pressures that physicians were facing. And so we made what was his second TikTok video ever, which was really fun. And since then, we've kind of stay connected. I've done work with the Office when it comes to mental health, especially youth mental health, talking about social media online, and making sure that we understand the harms of social media when it comes to misinformation, disinformation, but also the mental health harms of it, and how we can address those.

 

I often say that we're never taught how to use social media even though we use it, or even technology, even though we use it every single day, we would never do that for anything else, like a car, right? And in some ways, it could be just as harmful as a car if you're not using it correctly. So I've worked with them, the Surgeon General's team, a lot, in that aspect, the Vice President's team. I've worked with when it comes to reproductive health a lot. And so I talk a lot about black maternal mortality. How in the United States, Black women are three times as likely to die during childbirth when compared to white women, and in some places like upstate New York, you get upwards of nine times as more likely. And so that was a really cool experience, because I was invited. I've actually, I think, in the past four years, I've probably been to the White House at least a dozen times, which is kind of crazy for different events, but the one that was most impactful for me was I got to do a private round table with Vice President Harris, where she brought a lot of different creators who talk about issues like maternal health online, and we discussed what wrote the overturning Roe v Wade specifically meant for physicians, for doctors for patients. And had a great conversation about how we can use our platforms and the stories we were hearing from our own followers about the impacts of it. And so that was my one time where I got to actually, like, talk with her, have this cool picture, I'm shaking her hand, but that was, yeah, a really cool opportunity. And then I've done a lot of work with, not so much with the president's office, but on the president's office side too, when it comes to junk insurance fees. And so I went to an event for that. Or I've worked a lot with the Gun Violence Prevention Office with Representative Maxwell Frost from Florida. So lot of different kind of policy, the intersections of policy, media and then also medicine.

 

Santos: I also saw that you're writing a book, is that correct?

 

Bervell: Yeah, that one's been on hold for a while? I started writing it, then how to pause it. But the book is going to be essentially about a lot of these disparities the history of medicine. But kind of what my talk was tying in the history of medicine with the ongoing things today, the things that have and haven't changed, and understanding how we as individuals can change a system. Sometimes that starts with just using your voice and posting a video on Tiktok.

 

Santos: That sounds great. Do you have any I mean, I know you have, like, a six month period now before hopefully you start residency in the summer. What? What kind of things are you going to be prioritizing during that time to try to get done.

 

Bervell: Yeah. So I graduate very soon, as you're mentioning, in December. I'm a little off cycle, because I did a research year at Hopkins in orthopedic surgery, and started up in November last year. So I graduate in November, but I still match in March for Match Day, but between, before I start residency next year, in June, I'm gonna be traveling a lot. One of my goals in life has actually been to hit every single country in the world. And so I'm already trying to do South Africa. South Africa will be on there, but also South South America in general, Colombia, Peru, Brazil. I'll be going to, like, New Zealand, going to a lot of, like, eastern Asia. I'm currently I've done 50 countries, and so trying to get to more than that. I'll keep kind of posting and creating videos. I have more time for that too. So I'm excited to kind of branch out into different disciplines and connect medicine with things like climate change, for example. That's another one of my passions. And I've worked with Health and Human Services Admiral Levine on talking about climate change and health as well. So I think a lot of conferences, a lot of talks, but also a lot of personal traveling time, and then trying to get kind of all the products I have, from the TV show to the book done and out of the way. So there's a lot to do in six months, but I think I'll be able to.

CATEGORIES: Podcasts