“We’re there for our patients everywhere: inpatient, outpatient, ER, [in the] nursing home…social media was just that next frontier,” says Dr. Varshavski.

Dr. Varshavski may have never sat down in front of a camera, or even entered the medical profession if it weren’t for the fact that his father, Oskar, became an osteopath in the United States after fleeing Russia in 1994. Growing up in a cramped one-bedroom apartment in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, he saw his father take English lessons and work toward his medical degree in his 40s. As a kid, Dr. Varshavski loved watching his dad field a wide variety of clinical interactions. “It was definitely a unique upbringing,” he says.

His father always warned him against entering a “crumbling profession.” Health care in the late ’80s and early ’90s was shifting toward for-profit models, deregulation, and cost containment. But Dr. Varshavski nevertheless remained undeterred. Nearly two decades later, he would complete his own medical training at the NYIT College of Osteopathic Medicine. Early in his residency, he started posting on Instagram not to provide medical advice, but to show that a young doctor could “go through the whole education process and still have some sort of social life.” In 2015, after completing his residency, Varshavski noticed an online phenomenon playing out in his exam room at Atlantic Health Overlook Medical Center. “Parents were getting bad [medical] advice from Facebook,” Varshavski says. “I saw social media literally leading people that were not just worse for their health care, but full-on missing opportunities to get value out of our health care system.” As platforms like Instagram and TikTok began to play an even bigger part in people’s daily routines, their credence toward that medical misinformation deepened, so much so that patients were refusing everything from routine flu inoculations to life-saving cancer treatments. It was then that he realized how important an online presence was to getting medical advice across to as many people as possible. “That’s why I started my social media platform,” says Dr. Varshavski. “You need to be relatable.”

Everything changed in 2015, when he landed in People Magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive” issue with the title of “Sexiest Doctor Alive.” “It wasn’t about me publishing research or taking care of patients,” he says. “It was, ‘Check out this sexy doctor.’” He nevertheless leaned into the fanfare. “This was an opportunity to use the superficial as a hook for evidence-based medicine,” he says.