I had the idea of Unmasking Medicine sometime in April of 2020 but it wasn't going to be called Unmasking Medicine and it was going to be about healthcare policy only. It was also going to be a journal with full length articles and the like.
A month later I discovered the Morning Brew on a productivity YouTube channel whose name I no longer remember. It made me realize that people don't all hate newsletters, and that they could be used for good.
I also came to an extremely important realization as I was enjoying myself reading Morning Brew.
People will consume news and information on the path of least resistance. If fake news makes itself easy to find, easy to understand, and engaging in podcasts, facebook videos, and instagram posts, then people will consume it and they will believe it. The solution to fake news in medicine isn't to then go and tell people to only trust well established physicians and governmental authorities.
Rather, it is to distill the information from real research into an easily understood format. Into a format that people will want to consume it. The place to fight fake news isn't the CDC press room. It's on facebook, tiktok, YouTube, twitter, and the podcasts it is being broadcast on.
It is on the path of least resistance. If real medical news was easier to consume than fake medical news, then no one would consume any fake news.
To do that, I worked together with my friend Aniruddh Saxena to found Unmasking Medicine, where we could unmask medicine for everyone.
We later recruited more team members. Michael Li, who is in charge of managing the newsletter now while also doing a substantial portion of the writing and editing. Danika Lee, who was helping us create our instagram posts for a while before she had to leave, but not before referring Janey Yee to us, whose work on the animations and editing of our shorts and TikToks makes her talent self-apparent. Michael and Janey quickly grew to be a core part of our team.
Afterwards we were joined by Sindy Hsieh and Aisha Misbah. Sindy redesigned our instagram feed and distills the content from our newsletter into our 3 weekly IG posts. Aisha has become one of our writers who focuses on my original section of the newsletter, healthcare policy.
We will soon be recruiting a video editor to help me in creating short documentaries for our YouTube channel.
At the Unmasking Medicine, I learned what forming a business really takes. It isn't just about having the ability to create the product, it is simply impossible to do everything by yourself. As important as it is for an organization to have people that can create a high quality product, it is equally important for its members to be efficiently managed and tasks delegated.
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