Dealing with trolls on YouTube and My website : How being emergency physician helps

Hey all ,

If you're somebody who is vocal about his /her thoughts be prepared for backlash. Be it at workplace or cyberworld. I had been quiet for a while but I thought I'd acknowledge the most important people in my journey on YouTube and blogger.

Emergency medicine gives you a platform to face loud, polite, introvert, extrovert ,toxic and all kinds of people.You get the unique opportunity to stand for your patient fighting in the best interest of the patient looking at the bigger picture It helps you get out of tunnel vision. In my case my specialty has given me spine to Take a stand for things publicly.

 My experience :

The story starts with the me being vocal about my achievements my obstacles during my course of emergency medicine on my website. While some think it's commendable to talk about it in public there is another bunch that things it's fake or show off , everybody is entitled to have an opinion. No questions asked.

Most of the people keep their thoughts to themselves but there are people who are vocal about putting others down. I must say it takes a big spine to put somebody down on a public platform, revealing your identity taking your stand. 

Funnily some people got no spines so they prefer talking their mind without revealing their identities using fake IDs .

The idea of me writing this is because I don't not play the victim card but I'd say I'm a survivor of something like that. I've grown from a cry baby to a smart player.

So a group/ a single person with multiple identities very diligently started commenting on my blog initially it began with commenting about how useless my choice of emergency medicine is and how useless the course I have enrolled is. 

It was all and good spirit because everybody is entitled to have their own opinion until things began to be sounding very personal... From my way of communication my demeanor my appearance. Few days later It started getting personal to an extent of some false allegations. It was then I realized this was coming from a place of insecurity and hatred.

Later my phone number was traced down and I started getting offensive messages from unknown platforms. It got to my head and upset me. One fine day I woke up and lodged a FIR in this cyber cell. The police advised me to block the source. For peace of my mind , I disabled the comment section from my blog. Friends and family advice that I ignore it for my mental well-being. If you are somebody who has been raised by your family and well wishers who try to make the world a better place to live in,  falling for such such things is disheartening. And it put me off for a couple of days.

Few months later, I woke up with an idea of creating a YouTube channel to spread the word of emergency medicine, to know perspective of different individuals over different aspects of emergency medicine. What made me think twice was being trolled again by similar groups of people.

I proceeded because I saw more good with some buzzing bees that could be ignored if I had my ear plug on. Like you ignore the non productive specialists comment on the emergency medicine a residents credibility and work . 

Result :

1) I could meet amazing emergency physicians all over the world learn about their perspective.

2) go to where my fear of facing video camera.

3) fumbled initially but got smoother and creating videos and connecting with people.

Backlash

The bullying as expected and stuff and I started receiving nasty comments and targeted dislikes on my videos about the How I talk how I speak how these are organized things were. It was pretty clear that the things were not in good taste.

What they thought they would do would be making me feel bad about myself making me question my credibility put me down but you know what happened instead ?

Problem solving mode on ! 

1) Trash Triage :

I began to try and triage comments like emergency physician. If they meant good if they could save life in this scenario if it could improve my channel's quality ,I would take them. The rest I would push out like we send away non-emergent patients from the emergency.

2) I started thanking publicly even if they were offensive for their words be it mean or not so mean. I will just thank them for their time and effort to watch the entire 20 minute video to highlight my flaws so that I could work on them. 

Usually you beg people to watch the entire video and comment but theIr comments were helping me in a way they never thought they could. I would smile at every comment take the essential part and laugh out the non-essential part.

2) My videos started doing better , the because of the comments algorithms improved and my videos began to get thousands of views.

3) My videos reached more doctors who were not aware about emergency medicine or curious about emergency medicine.

4) My haters made me reach people I wanted to. End of the day everybody is happy .I get to spread the word of emergency medicine. They get to channelize their frustration over some of their life issues into something .People who need to know about emergency medicine get to know about it so it's a win-win game anyway.

So far so much!