Dr. YouTube!

Meet Mike Evans, Toronto family doctor and YouTube sensation

Dr. Mike Evans's health education videos cover topics ranging from smoking to flatulence. His YouTube videos have attracted and international audience.



By Theresa Boyle
Saturday, December 28, 2013

Mike Evans is best known as the bespectacled, gap-toothed comic book character from YouTube whose health education videos have attracted more than eight million hits.

When his first video went viral two years ago, no one was more surprised than the Toronto doctor.

He sent the video — 23 and 1/2 Hours, about the health benefits of exercise — to his wife and hockey team. In less than a week, 17,000 people had viewed it.

To date, it has been viewed more than 3.7 million times around the world and translated into eight languages, including Arabic to Gaelic.

“I remember checking it every 15 minutes, watching it just sort of take off,” Evans says.

Since then he has gone on to make 14 more videos — on everything from inflammatory bowel disease to acne — and additional productions are in the works.

The 49-year-old family physician from St. Michael’s Hospital appears to have found a magic formula for sating a voracious public appetite for health information in a digestible, entertaining format.

Videos by Evans, who is also a University of Toronto medical school professor, are essentially visual lectures that provide patients with tools — often non-medical interventions — to help them treat, better understand and prevent common maladies.

He refers to them as “edutainment.”

Their comic book style makes them easily accessible. In black and red marker, they are drawn on whiteboards with Evans’ voice narrating.

In 23 and 1/2 Hours, Evans is shown as a detective — wearing a plaid cap and carrying a magnifying glass — on the hunt for “the single best thing we can do for our health.”

Before revealing the result of his investigation, he whets viewers’ appetite by telling them the staggering results of this special treatment. In certain doses and for certain populations, it can reduce pain and disability from knee arthritis by 47 per cent, progress to dementia by 50 per cent and death rates by 23 per cent.

The single intervention turns out to be a half-hour of daily exercise, even just walking.

“It worked for so many different health problems and that’s what I found so cool about it,” Evans exclaims in the video, giving the thumbs up.

He then goes on to highlight results of studies that show the health benefits of exercise, but he spares viewers from minutiae of scientific evidence. There’s no medical jargon; he uses simple language.

Despite their simplicity, the videos are highly professional, produced and directed by award-winning cinematographer Nicholas de Pencier. The producer of the acclaimed documentary Watermark, named one of the TIFF Top Ten for 2013, is Evans’ childhood friend.

The key to the videos’ success, says de Pencier, is the way they are shared.

“The peer-to-peer experience helps the credibility,” he says. “You are more likely to watch a video and get the benefit of its message when someone you know and trust sends it to you. It’s kind of a vetting process.”

de Pencier also credits “the warm hand” of illustrator Liisa Sorsa. On this day, in a film studio near Lansdowne and Bloor, Sorsa is drawing caricatures of “Doctor Mike” in a new production about lower back pain.

Sorsa’s hand is shown throughout the videos, drawing characters on a whiteboard. The final products are shown in high speed.

“It is a very analogue approach to storytelling,” de Pencier explains. “In an age where the sky is the limit when it comes to graphics and fancy tricks, there is something about watching how Liisa’s creative process unfolds on screen. This is an intimate person-to-person thing.”

A video on smoking, released by the team in December, attracted 10,000 views in the first four days.

“We just released one, no pun intended, on flatulence as well,” Evans says. “That one had 5,000 or 6,000 views this week.”

So popular are the videos that acquaintances who don’t know any better occasionally advise Evans that he should watch them.

But one of the biggest measures of their success has been their entry into the popular culture. One episode of the award-winning television series Orange is the New Black is about the main character lobbying for the reopening of a jogging track at a women’s prison. She succeeds after telling prison officials about 23 and 1/2 Hours, rhyming off facts and figures from it in her arguments.

After seeing that video, Deb Kennedy, manager of rehabilitation for the Sunnybrook Holland musculoskeletal program, recruited Evans to make a video for patients getting hip and knee replacements.

The best thing about working with him is he doesn’t take himself too seriously, she says.

“He makes us laugh. Even when we are having a serious meeting, he has us in stitches.”

Affable and approachable, his personality comes out in his productions, she says, noting that the video about joint-replacement surgery was a stark contrast to another one she commissioned in 2006.

“That one is so boring and dry …. Patients may not catch all of it because it is so boring,” Kennedy says.

Evans’ video, on the other hand, is so good that other hospitals across Canada have asked to use it, she says.

“We love his user-friendly style. It’s animated and patients love watching it. It catches their attention and they stay tuned,” Kennedy says.

The Canadian Orthopaedic Foundation helped fund that video and for other productions, advocacy groups and charities affiliated with medical conditions have helped cover the costs.

The videos can cost up to $45,000 to make and Evans is now looking into the possibility of crowdfunding for causes that don’t have associated funding sources.

For a family doctor, his career has been unconventional. He never set out to become a doctor, completing an undergraduate degree in English literature from McGill.

After graduating, he spent a few years operating a drill on an ice island in the Arctic as part of a research program. He then travelled to India, where he worked with Mother Teresa in Kolkata, helping people with leprosy.

He ended up studying family medicine at McMaster.

Evans has now become something of a social entrepreneur, having established several private businesses that make videos and other health education tools.

Being open to failure is part of his success, he says. A venture to educate seniors about drugs by giving them hockey cards — explaining side effects and efficacy — when they picked up their prescriptions was a total flop, he admits.

The father of three, married to another family doctor, says he is “so lucky” and that his career has “spilled out in different ways that I wouldn’t have ever have imagined.”

Indeed, his YouTube audience continues to grow at an enviable pace.

“I used to joke that I used to see 20 patients a day,” he says, “and now (it’s) a couple hundred grand a month.”