These days, there’s no getting around it: In a society that practically lives online, it’s no surprise that two-thirds of people with cancer—and their caregivers—turn to social media to inform their treatment and care decisions.
Perhaps it was inevitable, then, that doctors like thoracic medical oncologist Eric Singhi, MD, would eventually follow suit. After all, what better way to reach and educate patients than by meeting them where they are? And if Dr. Singhi can counteract a little medical misinformation and help people better understand and appreciate the lifesaving impact of science in the process, well, even better.
“When I first began engaging on social media, I was mostly using professional platforms like X (formerly Twitter) and LinkedIn,” Dr. Singhi recalls. As his social media goals grew, however, he gradually expanded to other more personal platforms like TikTok and Instagram. What he found there alarmed him.
“I started seeing all of this misinformation about cancer, especially lung cancer,” he explains. “And it was frustrating. There were people without true medical training ... offering guidance and their thoughts and supplements and all of these things without data or evidence to back it up.”
In a landscape so ripe for misinformation and so impossible to control, Dr. Singhi knew it was impossible to purge or prevent it entirely. “I realized we couldn’t get rid of it,” he says. “What we should do is drown it out with credible experts who do have the training, right?”
And so, that’s exactly what he set out to do.
In this episode of Your Stories, Dr. Singhi—or, as he’s known on various social media platforms, @lungoncdoc—sits down with host Dr. Don Dizon (a social media maven in his own rite) to talk about his mission to make oncology make sense to patients and families, his determination to counter misinformation with genuine knowledge, and how he’s conquering cancer not only through his research, but by building an online community, one post (the occasional dancing doctor video) at a time.
