The TikTok Doctor

Alumni, Arches

Rose Marie Leslie ’12 sees social media as a way to combat health misinformation. Based on the 900,000 followers she's amassed and the media attention she's garnered, she's clearly doing something right.

When Rose Marie Leslie '12 first started using TikTok, it was mostly because she thought the videos were hilarious. Back in 2019, as a family medicine resident at University of Minnesota, she started posting some of her own: funny videos, set to music, about deciding what to wear to the hospital (as she flips through a pile of identical blue scrubs), poking fun at the Minnesota accent (don’t worry; she’s from there), or walking into the hospital in desperate search of coffee to prepare for another long shift.

Every now and then, between the funny videos, she would post a “Daily Doctor Fact,” something simple, sometimes silly (“only some people have the receptors that allow them to smell asparagus pee!"), but always informative, even in the 20 or so seconds she had. In these videos, Leslie faces the camera head-on, her big brown eyes often framed by bold glasses and her bright lipstick offering her a bubbly, approachable demeanor, even as she speaks matter of factly about everything from gender identity and contraception to why not to use Q-tips to clean out ear wax. “Did you know using Q-tips can make your ear wax worse?” she asks in one video. “[I]t actually puts people at risk for something called cerumen impaction—essentially that’s when you put in the Q-tip and it just jams all the ear wax deeper and deeper into your ear. You get ear wax stuck up against your ear drum, which can cause hearing problems and can rip your ear drum open.” Ouch, noted!

These early videos got her some response— mostly questions from the Generation Z crowd, which is TikTok’s main user base. So she kept it up. But within a few months, Leslie’s posts hit upon a topic that started to get her even more response: vaping. In one clip, she recreates what a vaping patient’s lungs sound like. Around this time, in late 2019, news broke of a mysterious illness affecting people who had recently used electronic cigarettes. So in several videos, Leslie explained what the medical community knew about the disease at the time. In one, she shows the chest X-ray of a healthy person’s lungs and one of the lungs of a person with this mysterious illness: lungs nearly all whited out where a healthy black image should be.

Discussion on her posts jumped, and videos that had been getting thousands of views were suddenly getting millions. Leslie started getting media attention, as well—Rolling Stone, Good Morning America, and others did stories about her—and TikTok itself honored her in December 2020 as its No. 1 “most impactful creator.”

“There's a lot of unknowns still, about the effects of vaping and e-cigarette use, and so whenever there's unknowns, especially in science, there's always a lot of discussion,” she told me in a recent Zoom interview from her home in Faribault, Minn.

While Leslie was pleased by the amount of traffic her videos were receiving, she was most buoyed by the fact that her message was getting out to an audience hungry for reliable medical information. Some comments really drove home that her videos were making an impact, like the one telling her: “My brother vapes, and I talked to him today about quitting!”

CHANGING THE MISINFORMATION GAME: Social media can be a hotbed of misinformation. But Nick Brody, associate professor and chair of communication studies, says public health experts like Rose Marie Leslie ’12 who take the plunge into social media platforms can help combat false information. Read the sidebar.

Making a difference is what brought Leslie to medicine in the first place.

As a high school student, she worked as a peer educator; later, while at University of Puget Sound, she volunteered at Sea Mar clinics doing health education and working closely with a primary care provider there. She decided then that she wanted to go into medicine. After graduating with a molecular and cellular biology major and a minor in Spanish in 2012 from Puget Sound, she moved back to the Twin Cities area to work as a health educator in a primary care clinic for two years while she studied for the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) and went through the medical school application process.

“One of the reasons I ended up wanting to go to medical school was because I loved speaking with people about their health and educating folks, and I wanted to take it to that next step, where I was also able to provide care,” she says.

Some of that drive to educate in smaller settings, whether one-on-one in a clinic room or recording a video on her iPhone, came from Leslie’s time at Puget Sound. Her public high school in Minneapolis wasn’t the most well equipped when it came to science labs, and Leslie came to her college-level science courses without some of the experience that other students did; Puget Sound’s small classes and close-knit learning environment helped her catch up. “I had the opportunity to really say, ‘Hey, I’ve never done this before, and most people have, and I have no idea what’s going on. Can you help me?’” she says. “And everyone did.”

Leslie started medical school in 2014 at University of Minnesota. She decided on a family medicine residency once she realized she could work as a primary care doctor, providing care and health education to patients of all ages. As a family doctor, she can also care for pregnant people and help deliver babies—one of her other passions.

While Leslie sees one-on-one clinical care and educating patients in person as her most important job, she says social media has given her access to people who often don’t see their primary care providers a whole lot: young people. “Teens and young adults often don't seek out health care in the same way that other populations do,” says Leslie. They might come in for an annual sports physical in high school, but once they’re off to college or starting a career, likely with spotty health insurance, they often don’t see a doctor regularly. “So they don’t have that interaction with somebody who has medical training to be able to talk with about these topics. TikTok captures that age group.”

Social media also can help break down a major barrier to health care: that people are nervous about going to the doctor or have had bad experiences with medical providers in the past.

“One of my goals is to make sure that people understand that I'm a person just like they are,” she says. “I just want to have a conversation with people like I would with a friend. So when I’m talking about a health care topic, I want to break down that power differential—and I think social media can be a tool to do that.”

Her tactics continue to include lots of humor, like a video where a voiceover says “When you’re a doctor and forget to listen to your own advice,” as she pans the video over a sunburnt shoulder. This, plus peeks into her life, like walks she takes with her dog, Mack, to decompress, or how it works logistically for a doctor to race to the hospital when a pregnant patient goes into labor, help humanize her. At the same time, her straightforward approach to discussing everything from chemicals in beauty products to pregnancy prevention reveal a doctor who knows her stuff.

Rose Marie Leslie ’12

"Teens and young adults often don't seek out health care in the same way that other populations do. TikTok captures that age group."

Even with all of her social media success—she has nearly 910,000 TikTok followers and recently partnered with the Minnesota Department of Public Health on a project aimed at helping teens quit vaping—Leslie is not about to become a full-time influencer.

For one, after graduating from her medical residency last June, she started a position in the fall as a primary care doctor at Allina Health in Faribault, about 50 miles south of Minneapolis-St. Paul.

She isn’t slowing her video output, though, either. She usually posts around five videos a week, even when she’s taking time off from her day job—last summer, for example, she had a break between her residency and starting her new job, and she documented the time off via TikTok. Videos focused on her move from urban Minneapolis to rural Faribault, trips to see family in Wisconsin and college friends in Washington, D.C., and a monthlong road trip across the West with her husband, Nate, a chemist. The two nature lovers hiked through Colorado after attending a friend’s wedding, and Leslie didn’t keep her educator hat off for long: She detailed safety tips for hiking through bear country on one video as they made their way along a gorgeous mountain trail.

She and Nate deserved some time off to travel. Their April 2020 wedding happened just as the COVID-19 pandemic was ramping up in the U.S., and as a result they had to cancel their honeymoon to Costa Rica. (They finally got to go last September.)

COVID-19 has given Leslie another reason to continue her social media use: to counter the many other voices that have found homes online to spread medical misinformation.

Medical misinformation online is nothing new. According to the American Medical Association, physicians are spending more time having to address misinformation with their patients. More than half of online health articles are “problematic” and one-quarter of YouTube videos about COVID-19 contain misleading information, the AMA says.

Leslie feels a responsibility to join that conversation, rather than stay out of the online fray. “Especially during the pandemic, people are staying home and are looking online for resources and information,” she says. “Social media is the space. It’s not bad or good. It exists.”

Nick Brody, Puget Sound associate professor and chair of communication studies, who researches the social implications of technology, agrees. In some ways, Brody says, social media has democratized the process of reaching a wide audience. “In the last few years, we’ve seen the upside of that, as it relates to social justice movements like Black Lives Matter, for instance, which was able to reach a really broad audience with important messages and information,” Brody says. However, he continues, we’ve also seen the downside, especially misinformation about the pandemic and vaccines.

Leslie has experienced the pandemic firsthand— as a medical resident in a hospital that was overwhelmed with patients—and the online spread of misinformation has only added to the struggle, as protestors outside of hospitals are a regular occurrence. “It’s honestly heartbreaking,” she says. “You can see why people would leave their jobs if they’re providing lifesaving care and getting told they’re doing something horrible. It has not been easy.”

At the same time, social media has brought Leslie some hope at a difficult time: In the comments on her videos, she often sees people who aren’t vaccinated but are still open to vaccination at some point—they just want to learn more— and that inspires her to keep the conversation going.

Still, she knows that social media can be a double-edged sword. “Social media platforms were designed for users to want to use them more and more, and to feel like they continuously need likes and shares and all that stuff,” she says. That drive for likes, plus the overwhelming nature of bad news and misinformation, can be tough on everyone’s mental health. But when she steps back, she can see the reasons she continues to use social media as a method of health education. Like when people tell her they’ve decided to get vaccinated or are looking into quitting vaping because of a video she made. “That is why I’m doing this. It’s not for likes, it’s not for shares. It’s so that there are people who can get information and make decisions about their health that would really benefit them.”