Watch the AMA's daily COVID-19 update, with insights from AMA leaders and experts about the pandemic.
Featured topic and speakers
AMA Chief Experience Officer Todd Unger talks with the physician host of "Coronavirus in Context" about the importance of correcting misinformation about COVID-19 and providing reliable information to consumers as well as physicians in ways they can understand and act upon.
Learn more at the AMA COVID-19 resource center.
Speakers
- John Whyte, MD, MPH, chief medical officer, "Coronavirus in Context," WebMD
Transcript
Unger: Hello, this is the American Medical Association's COVID-19 Update. Today we're talking with Dr. John Whyte, the chief medical officer of WebMD about what he's learned as the host of WebMD's COVID In Context daily video update in Washington, D.C. I'm Todd Unger, AMA's Chief Experience Officer in Chicago. Dr. Whyte, you've interviewed more than 150 experts, including Dr. Fauci, the director of the CDC, Dr. Redfield, government officials, scientists, physician leaders and I believe I've even seen Tim Tebow in there.
Dr. Whyte: Yeah.
Unger: Talk to me a little bit about when you undertook this effort for these video updates, what were you hoping to achieve?
Dr. Whyte: It's great to be with you, and really our focus was the title of the show. How do we put it in context? There's a lot of misinformation out there. Government agencies often parse their statements so carefully that it's hard to understand. Even though the CDC is a great source of information on their site, if you're able to weed through it. And what we really wanted to do was to provide information to consumers, as well as to physicians in ways that they could understand, that they could act upon, and in a structure that they're going to relate to. So you mentioned we have folks like Tim Tebow and Deepak Chopra, it's those scientific experts, but it's also those popular icons. Because we want to get the message out there, and that's not easy to do in this environment as you know.
Unger: Well, let's talk a little bit more about something you mentioned with this: misinformation.
You've said that one of your key takeaways has been the importance of being guided by science. That's entirely, of course, consistent with AMA's point of view. And we've seen so often through this pandemic, that's not always the case with the public. So tell us about how do you approach correcting misinformation that you see circulating right now?
Dr. Whyte: Yeah, and I get very frustrated that there's almost this distrust of science, and when have we seen that before? And everyone is their own armchair epidemiologist, and they can always find some doctor... I'm going to be honest, to roll out to say something that isn't always backed by science. So our goal has really been when we see something wrong, such as swallowing bleach or disinfectants, or the group of doctors that talked about hydroxychloroquine being a way of prevention. We get on our website that day, usually on our homepage and across our social media platforms to correct it. And I'm going to be honest, Todd, sometimes we get some angry, very negative comments in social media. But you know what? Our focus is we're going to do what's right. And we're going to provide people the best information, even when there's conspiracy theory out there. So when we see the information and hear the information, we work hard to correct it, and we use all our platforms to do it.
Unger: It's the pandemic equivalent of if you see something, say something, is what you're saying.
Dr. Whyte: That's right.
Unger: Well, I'm going to talk to you about your other takeaways. Let's talk about the need for people, including physicians, to take care of themselves. That's a theme that we've seen repeated here, too, when we talk to physicians. Tell us about what you learned about both the mental and physical toll that COVID-19 is taking.
Dr. Whyte: On the physician side, we've had these conversations with Dr. Esther Choo and Dr. Richard Isaacs, who talked about the impact of burnout almost as a PTSD on physicians and other front-line responders, that they can't almost act some days. And remember burnout was a problem pre-COVID, and COVID has exacerbated it. And part of what we had heard is: it's still tough to ask for help. You know this, medicine is very hierarchical, people aren't always celebrated if they ask for help and ask for support, but we need to make it easier for them.
That's what we've heard from our physician colleagues, that we need to create systems where people are automatically asked about their day and how they're doing. And if something happened in the institution, they're proactively reached out to, that resources are made known. And we've seen it on the same side with consumers, talking to Arianna Huffington and Deepak Chopra that talked... Sometimes we have to try to focus on the positive, and every day remember what we're grateful for while knowing there's a lot of pain and anxiety going on. So it's really, in some ways, doing these small steps, but doing something to try to address it.
Unger: Well, that very much resonates with the next question, which is, you're not only talking to experts, but you're also amplifying the human side and human stories. Can you tell us more about those and what you've learned?
Dr. Whyte: We recently profiled a gentleman who lost several members of his family, parents, siblings, to COVID. And in many of these stories people have talked about, they didn't think it was that serious. They hadn't known someone who had had it. So they didn't take all the precautions that they wish they should have. Not that they're in some way responsible, that's not our focus, but what we're trying to remind people is, this is real and it has an impact. And especially if you don't have any underlying health conditions, you tend to think, "It's not going to happen to me, I'm strong." I've had lots of patients who say, "I never get the flu." Until they get the flu, and then they regret that they didn't get the flu vaccine.
So that's been the consistent message that we've been hearing. The pain, the anguish, and the fact that they wish that maybe they had taken it more seriously early on. And they come on the show, to be honest, Todd, to give this cautionary tale. That's really has been what they've wanted to say, "I want to tell other people about my experience, so they don't have the same one." And I'm so grateful for them telling them the story.
Unger: There are a lot of additional side effects, so to speak, of this pandemic, that surround COVID-19. What are you seeing as how this has magnified other problems that existed with the health care system, even before the pandemic?
Dr. Whyte: There's the general financial issues. We had a great conversation with Suze Orman who really talked about, "Health is wealth." And in many ways we ignore our health early on to gain wealth. And then when we finally have wealth, then we want to focus on our health, but COVID has thrown all of that by the wayside. And people are having difficulty meeting their food needs, let alone talking about procedures. They're having more difficulty covering their prescription drugs, and then we're turning to comfort foods and that's exacerbating problems with obesity. We call it COVID-19, but we're also talking about the COVID-15, and I'm experiencing that to some degree in terms... We have this anxiety, and we're gaining weight, and we're not doing the things that normally we would have done in terms of getting out. So there's so much collateral damage as well. It's not just the infection itself, but the mental health pandemic that we're having, the financial health pandemic that we're having. And we really have to figure out a strategy of how do we get to the next point.
Unger: Well, in one of your interviews, you asked what Thanksgiving is going to look like this year. I know it's only August, but the numbers are pretty grim. We've got over 5 million cases, we're approaching 200,000 deaths in this country. What can we expect into the fall? And how are you recommending that we prepare for it?
Dr. Whyte: Right, so we have to be realistic that we don't expect things to return to any sense of pre-COVID normal probably before the end of this year. So Thanksgiving is going to be tough. The challenge is going to be, what's the impact of flu? And that's why we're encouraging everyone to get the flu shot, because we don't want to have all the challenges that we have with flu and superimpose the issues of COVID. And then there's a real concern that whether it's one wave, or two waves, or just one wave that continues to cause challenges, we're not going in the right direction. And even when we start to see a decrease in the rate of increase, that rate is still too high. So I think it's going to be a tough call. The other issue is the vaccine, we're all tying returning to normalcy to the vaccine.
But we also know there's a large percentage of people... We saw [inaudible] our own surveys and others have confirmed it, that aren't going to get a vaccine or aren't going to get it in the first few months. They want to see what else happens. Because here we can celebrate innovation, right. But then in some ways it seems like it's going too fast to some people, so are they willing to take it? Are they cutting corners? I often say it's like a baking analogy. We're all doing baking right now, and I've been doing some baking and you know what? If you don't bake it long enough, I've learned, if you don't put enough flour in, things aren't going to turn out as well as you would like.
And that's a big concern. So I'm not so sure even early next year, say if there is a vaccine, it's going to be a while before everyone's going to have exposure to it. So we really have to think about, how are we going to live with the virus? How are we going to assess risk? There's never zero risk and that's the discussion that we need to be having.
Unger: Well, you're 150 episodes in. We're now at about 100 ourselves here and I know there have been a lot of memorable moments along the way for us. If you think back across all of those episodes that you've done, are there any that stick out about what you've learned or ideas that came across that you weren't expecting?
Dr. Whyte: It's really this theme in many ways that, how do we stay sane while we stay safe? So a lot of people are very anxious, search on anxiety is seven times this year in the same time frame that it was last year. And how do we get people to make the right choices? That's what people really want to know when they're searching COVID on our site. Dr. Fauci was a terrific interview. It was a in many ways success, because we did at a time when he really wasn't doing interviews, so I'll remember that interview. But it's also those stories that you referenced earlier where people are giving this cautionary tale. The big themes have been, how do we address this misinformation, how do we talk about innovation, and how do we help folks live with the virus? That's what we're trying to do.
And as physicians, how do we help people get the right information? I think physicians have to be leaders. I want physicians to be active more on social media, correcting misinformation, being a resource for patients. And sometimes it's hard, we mentioned government sites. In medicine, we have our parlance, we use terms that people don't know, and then they don't come to our site or don't follow us on Twitter. Because we're not reaching them in ways that they can understand. Health literacy, health numeracy is a big issue, and then we need to use those strategies to figure out how to best address this in ways that consumers can understand. Just as we do when we talk to our patients one to one, how do we talk to a larger population and have an impact?
Unger: Absolutely. Well, Dr. Whyte, thanks so much for being with us here today. You can catch Dr. Whyte's COVID In Context video updates on WebMD every day. That's it for today's COVID-19 update, we'll be back on Monday with another segment. For updated resources on COVID-19 visit ama-assn.org/COVID-19. Thanks for joining us and please take care.
Disclaimer: The viewpoints expressed in this video are those of the participants and/or do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the AMA.
