It sounds like a ridiculous question. Until you’re a doctor with a social media following and you know the parents of the child you’re worried about are watching.
Before COVID, I loved the spontaneous, ridiculous moments that broke up the intensity of hospital life. Flash mobs with nurses. Dancing with OR staff. Laughing with ICU doctors. Small moments of silliness among people doing very serious work.
Then COVID hit, and the dancing stopped. People were dying around us. We were frightened, exhausted, and somber. There was nothing funny about what was happening, and for a long time, I had no desire to pretend otherwise.
But eventually the world began to open again. And slowly, so did that part of me. I started laughing with my coworkers again. Making videos. Being creative. Being silly in small doses in the middle of a stressful, high-pressure surgical career.
Real physician voices, twice a week
Free, and one click to unsubscribe.
And something unexpected happened: My patients loved it. Or at least many of them did. Parents told me that seeing me be ridiculous on social media made me more human and approachable. Their children watched too.
“Dr. Lando is nice,” parents could tell a nervous child before an appointment. “Remember that funny video we watched? There’s nothing to be scared of.” For a pediatric surgeon, that matters.
But there are days when the equation feels very different. Recently, I found myself caring for two long-term patients in the hospital who were having rocky, complicated postoperative courses. These weren’t routine ear tubes or tonsillectomies. These were children undergoing some of the more difficult operations I perform. These surgeries include airway reconstruction and complex endoscopic airway surgery on neonatal and pediatric ICU patients. And I knew their parents followed me. Suddenly, posting something funny didn’t feel quite so simple.
If your child is struggling to breathe, and the surgeon caring for that child appears on your phone dancing an hour later, what do you think? Do you understand that the video may have taken thirty seconds between cases? Or do you wonder: Why isn’t she thinking about my child? Do you wonder whether I could be doing something more?
Intellectually, I know the answer. A physician cannot and should not spend every waking moment consumed by every sick patient under their care. We eat. We sleep. We laugh. We go home to our families. We have lives that continue alongside the suffering we witness at work.
But social media has changed something. Patients used to see only the part of their doctors’ lives that occurred in front of them. Now they can see what we are doing five minutes after we leave their hospital room. And I’m not sure we’ve fully considered what that means.
So, I did something admittedly unscientific: I asked a few parents of my more medically complex patients. One mother, whose child I have cared for through a long and difficult journey, surprised me with her enthusiasm.
“Honestly, I love it. It makes me as a parent feel closer to you in a weird way. And Aubree loves watching all your videos. It’s the highlight of her day.”
Another parent told me that seeing the humor and silliness allowed her to see “the human being behind the care of my child.” Those responses touched me deeply.
But I also know my sample is hopelessly biased. These are parents with whom I have close relationships. Their children’s ultimate outcomes were good, even when the roads getting there were frightening and bumpy. Ask a parent while their child is deteriorating in an ICU, and the answer might be very different. And that answer would be understandable.
Pediatric otolaryngology is a specialty of extraordinary extremes. Much of my practice involves otherwise healthy children with problems we can fix: ear infections, snoring, and other common childhood conditions. They have relatively short procedures, recover, and return to their lives. Then there are children with more serious but ultimately treatable problems such as neck masses, swallowing disorders, and airway abnormalities that we may be able to correct surgically.
And then there is the other end of the spectrum in which I treat extremely premature infants with damaged lungs and devastating neurologic injuries. I care for previously healthy children who require surgical airways after catastrophic accidents. My patients include kids who need airway reconstruction and those born with complex genetic disorders who may never walk, speak, or develop in the ways their parents once imagined. I move between these worlds sometimes within the same hour.
Perhaps that is why humor has always existed in hospitals. It isn’t because we don’t understand the gravity of what happens there. It may be because we understand it too well.
The question is what happens when that humor is no longer contained within the hospital walls. Social media collapses contexts. A silly video made after an uncomplicated clinic day can appear on the phone of a mother sitting beside her critically ill child. A joke intended for colleagues can land in the feed of a family receiving devastating news.
The algorithm doesn’t know the difference. But physicians should.
I don’t think the answer is that doctors must revert to solemn public figures. In fact, I increasingly believe there is value in patients seeing that their doctors are human beings who laugh, dance, have families, make mistakes, and occasionally look ridiculous. That humanity can create connection.
But visibility also creates responsibility. There may be moments when we need to read the room, even when the “room” is thousands of people scrolling through their phones.
I still make funny videos. I still dance with my coworkers. I still believe joy and silliness have a valued place in medicine, perhaps especially because so much of medicine is difficult.
But now, before I hit “post,” I sometimes think about the parent sitting beside a hospital bed. And I ask myself a question that didn’t exist for most physicians a generation ago: If they see this right now, what will it feel like to them? I don’t always have the answer to guide me.
Maybe the fact that I’m asking is the point.
This article is discussed on The Podcast by KevinMD: Doctors on social media should ask this question first.
Tali Lando is a fellowship-trained pediatric otolaryngologist, airway surgeon, author, and speaker whose work bridges medicine and storytelling. She maintains a busy academic surgical practice at Maria Fareri Children’s Hospital at Westchester Medical Center, with particular expertise in pediatric airway, swallowing disorders, sleep apnea, and sleep endoscopy. She is affiliated with New York Medical College of Touro University.
A graduate of Weill Cornell Medical College and the Cornell-Columbia ENT residency program, she completed her pediatric otolaryngology fellowship at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. A dedicated educator and mentor, she uses compelling clinical stories to teach the realities and humanity of medicine.
Her peer-reviewed scholarship spans pediatric airway management, foreign body aspiration, congenital neck masses, and laryngeal disorders, with work appearing in Laryngoscope, Annals of Otology, Rhinology, and Laryngology, and the International Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology. She has also contributed chapters to leading pediatric otolaryngology textbooks.
She is the author of Breathless: Surgical Tales from the Brink and Back, which brings readers inside the high-stakes world of pediatric surgery with an unflinchingly honest voice, and Hell & Back: Doctor & Patient, Wife & Mother, Dragon Slayer. Through speaking, podcasts, writing, and social media, she hopes to inspire medical students, residents, and future physicians while offering an authentic glimpse into the busy life of a surgeon, mother, and clinician. She shares updates on LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok.
