Dr. Glaucomflecken Shares Humor on Social Media and at 2023 Critical Care Congress

Wondering if you should take the social media plunge? Social media star and comedian Dr. Glaucomflecken, aka ophthalmologist William E. Flanary, MD, urges critical care professionals to go for it. “I always encourage healthcare professionals to get on social media because that’s where patients are, and we need to meet them where they are,” said Dr. Flanary, who along with his wife, Kristin Flanary, MA, shared social media insights as well as his experience as an ICU patient during his presentation of the Peter Safar Honorary Lecture, “Wife and Death: Featuring Dr. and Lady Glaucomflecken,” on January 22, 2023, at the Society of Critical Care Medicine’s (SCCM) 2023 Critical Care Congress in San Francisco, California.


With SCCM launching its own TikTok channel, it’s a good time to test the waters. “People who didn’t grow up with social media may not think it’s professional, but the definition of professionalism is changing, and using social media to talk about sensitive subjects is a great thing,” he said. He has several social media tips. “We have a unique place in society, taking care of people’s health, and that is very sensitive information,” he said. “Be careful who you make fun of. Don’t punch down. Pretty much all of my content is physicians making fun of each other. The bottom line is: Don’t put anything out there that’s going to undermine trust in physicians and healthcare professionals from a patient perspective.”

 
Dr. Flanary did stand-up comedy before medical school and says his social media bread and butter is poking fun at medicine and pointing out issues in healthcare, including the highs and the lows. STAT News calls him “the internet’s funniest doctor”¹ and he is in high demand. He has spoken at many medical conferences and served as the commencement speaker at several graduations, including Yale School of Medicine.



As a full-time ophthalmologist in private practice and the father of two daughters, Dr. Flanary works on his comedic videos at night and on weekends. He launched Dr. Glaucomflecken (the name alludes to a sign of acute angle-closure glaucoma) in 2016 on Twitter because he was bored at a medical conference. He initially started Dr. Glaucomflecken to “tell jokes about eyeballs, but in the end it was a surrogate for getting on stage and doing comedy, and I found it therapeutic,” he said. It helped him cope with his second diagnosis of testicular cancer (he was initially diagnosed three years earlier at age 27) and it gave him an outlet for getting back to comedy since, with a family and career, he no longer had time to do stand-up. He started doing videos for YouTube and TikTok during the pandemic.

  He and his wife spoke at SCCM’s Congress about their significant experiences on the other side of healthcare, as a patient and survivor, including positive and negative interactions with medical practitioners. In May 2020, Dr. Flanary nearly died after having a cardiac arrest. His wife heard him gasping for breath in the middle of the night and performed CPR until emergency medical services arrived. He was intubated and spent two days in the ICU. “They cooled me down for 24 hours. It was the longest 24 hours of Kristin’s life. It was early in the pandemic and she couldn’t be with me. I was oblivious. All I remember is waking up in a hospital bed and I wasn’t wearing underwear.”

He remembers that the ICU nurses were wonderful. “My biggest memory was being handed a box on discharge day, opening it up and seeing a wearable defibrillator, with a picture of a 90-year-old man wearing this bra. It hits you as a young person (he was 34 at the time) that this is not supposed to be happening to me.” He still doesn’t know what caused the cardiac arrest. His physician has since given him a clean bill of health.

  During the pandemic, he began doing comic videos, where he plays several roles in the same video, typically a medical student and physicians. He currently has more than 865,000 followers on YouTube, two million on TikTok and 663,000 on Twitter. Kristin Flanary is now managing his brand. They also produce a podcast called “Knock Knock Hi!” which starts with a medical student saying those words. They invite healthcare professionals who tell embarrassing or silly stories. “The goal of the blog and videos is to break down that ‘whatever’ that people think doctors are and show them that doctors are just like real people,” he said.

He plans to continue making the videos. “The comments that mean the most to me are the ones where people say it helps them with their mental health and that it felt good to laugh at the end of a hard day,” he said. “Also the ones where they say ‘I’m not in medicine but for some reason I enjoy these videos.’”

References

1. Garde D. The internet’s funniest doctor is in on the joke. STAT News. March 25, 2022. Accessed January 25, 2023. https://www.statnews.com/2022/03/25/dr-glaucomflecken-will-flanary-profile/