Doctor Caught Looking Up How to Treat a Patient’s Cyst on YouTube in Viral TikTok

There's a strong argument to be made that the university educational model isn't exactly necessary for all vocations. There's a reason why a lot of top companies like Google, Tesla, Netflix, Apple are all offering folks high-ranking job opportunities in their respective companies as long as they have a demonstrative ability to get work done as opposed to just securing a piece of paper that says they're competent.

A lot of arguments have been made in recent years, too, at University's abilities to actually prepare folks for careers, as actual work experience and evident work in self-started projects and clear abilities to pursue and achieve professional-level deliverables are more in demand than 62 credits of irrelevant course work and another 62 credits of heading over to ratemyprofessor.com to find out the easiest pathway to a decent GPA.

But there are some jobs where you probably want someone to attain some type of certification. Take the medical field, for instance. Med school, while prohibitively expensive, still puts folks through a grueling gamut of endless work. So much so that it'd be hard to argue that anyone would take the job "just" for a paycheck. Sure, after a while doctors can become jaded or disillusioned with their work, but becoming a certified MD or DO is no joke.

But that doesn't mean that getting through Med School and then rotations automatically imbues you with a wealth of encyclopedic knowledge you can consult on a whim. We'd like to think that whoever is looking after us when we're at the hospital or heading into private practice for a consultation/procedure can solve whatever's wrong with us at a moment's notice, but doctors are people after all.

Something that TikToker @isi_lynott experienced first hand when they were undergoing treatment for a cyst and peeped into the hallway only to see their doctor checking out treatments for it on YouTube.

She recorded the web browsing session as part of a now-viral TikTok with a text overlay that read: "Got their MD at YouTube university" and sparked a viral debate in the comments section.

Many took the TikToker's comments at face value, pushing back against the clip and stating that this physician was just doing their job: they were consulting other experts in the field to ensure that they were providing the correct treatment to their patient.

Others openly criticized the TikToker as having a simplistic notion of the work that doctors do and expressed that it was unfair to expect a human being to walk around knowing how to treatment every single possible ailment the human body can suffer from at a moment's notice.

Folks who said that they were med students in the comments section backed this argument up stating that even the most seasoned of doctors refresh their knowledge, while other commenters remarked that it was probably much better for the TikToker that their doctor was double and triple-checking correct treatment plans and procedures before giving them a diagnosis.

But there were some patients who were a bit more dubious of this practice and shared medical anecdotes of their own, like one TikToker who stated that a doctor's advice on how to best take care of their girlfriend's broken foot was a verbatim excerpt from the first page of Google search results.

Others turned the entire thing into a joke, discussing the economics of going to a "YouTube" doctor: "That would be 36281$ + YouTube premium fee."

How would you feel if you consulted with a doctor only to find out that they gave you a bunch of information you could've searched up on your smartphone while browsing the internet on the toilet?