since the pandemic, doctors and emergency physicians have been providing information on TV sets and radio antennas

Spotlight on doctors becoming reporters. The pandemic has favored the emergence of the phenomenon: general practitioners and emergency doctors take over the antennas to inform, tell the hospital seen from the inside or talk about pathology. An emergency doctor from Nancy even created his Youtube channel. It’s called DocFX.

Doctors on radio antennas and TV sets, this is not a new affair. Michel Cymès started on franceinfo 25 years ago. Since the pandemic, doctors and emergency physicians have found an important echo on social networks. Jean-Daniel Flaysakier then Damien Mascret became figures of the television news on France Télévisions.

François-Xavier launches, after noticing the emergence of a community around his Twitter account. Doc FX, emergency doctor in Epinal, then in Nancy, has however gone through difficult times on social networks. His position for the vaccine earned him death threats. Regardless, the times require a strong commitment from the scientific community to counter misinformation and partisan positions.

He invests his own funds in equipment, to create a high-tech studio at home, and launch his You Tube channel. It was in September 2022, and since then, his audience has continued to grow. He is not an influencer, the domain of Doc FX is public health. Publish videos to answer questions asked in consultation, or to explain “why we wait so long in the emergency room”, tell the service seen from the inside, while being educational, factual and non-activist. This is an important point.

If sometimes, the question of understaffing is mentioned, it is to underline a heaviness and a difficulty, but never in a claiming tone. That’s not the point. In style speed, mounted tight YouTube style, the avowed objective is also to capture a young audience, too often bombarded with false information, especially in the field of health. Doc FX dubs them “urban legends”.

When one suffers from a pathology, one rushes on the Internet, and often, what one finds is “anything” which anguishes. So to “viralize” the truth, to provide reliable public health information, which allows citizens to acquire good reflexes before going to the emergency room, or correct postures in life-saving gestures, Doc FX gives of its time: how to perform a cardiac massage, identify the nature of the vertigo of which one is a victim. Doc FX, in his practice as a medical reporter, responds to a need dictated by the times. A need for info.

Health journalism cannot be taught

Either you are a journalist interested in the issue, and you specialize, or you are a doctor and the desire to transmit information leads to newsrooms. “I’m not a journalist, I’m a doctor!” : this sentence that we owe to doctor Gérald Kierzek, the third most present personality on the national news between January 18 and July 3, 2020, all the doctors or emergency physicians who intervene in the media sphere repeat it.

This medical journalist phenomenon articulates moral values ​​and scientific progress, in the name of public health information that is neither political nor economic, and does not enter into a field of conflicts of interest. Those who engage in the profession of medical reporter seek first of all to maintain a professional ideal, made up of scientific faith, love of truth, freedom of judgment, independence of character, spirit of solidarity. broad and tolerant, of disinterestedness.