Dr. Mikhail Varshavski, better known as Dr. Mike, has more than 20 million social media followers thanks to his straight talk on important medical issues from COVID to obesity.
And there’s his dreamboat physique that once won the New Yorker the title “Sexiest Doctor Alive.”
But Dr. Mike is now using his celebrity status to raise awareness about the brutal Russian invasion and support the war-ravaged Ukrainian people.
“War is never the answer,” Varshavski says in an evocative new video. “Innocent people are suffering.”
“My responsibility is to my patients…but I do want to do something,” he adds. “To the Ukrainian people, know that we stand with you.”
An immigrant from Russia at the age of 6, Varshavski wanted to share his story about the courage of his parents to take their young children and leave everything they knew and loved to take their chances as refugees in the United States more than 25 years ago.
His father, Ukrainian and Jewish, was concerned about anti-Semitism and corruption. “Crime was an all-time high, the economy was collapsing, and the education system was suffering,” said Varshavski. “There was so little money be put towards the future of Russia, and my father became genuinely worried. He was right about just about everything.”
Because of his Russian and Ukrainian background, Dr. Mike has been peppered by questions about the conflict since Russia unleashed the invasion more than a month ago. He believes he can reach young people and others who are not aware of the geopolitical issues involved uninformed about the horrors of the war.
“We have a wide reach, and people may be trying to make sense of what is going on,” Varshavski said. “We can tell them that this is an unprovoked war, and we support an immediate end to it.”
He also wants to nip in the bud any potential backlash against Russian-Americans, most of whom do not support the invasion.
“Just because we are from Russia does not mean we are for this war,” Varshavski said.
Varshavski, 32, has also been stunned at the number of patients experiencing serious mental health impacts like panic attacks sparked by the war or the possibility of a wider global conflict.
Even his father, also a physician who practices in Brooklyn, has experienced flashbacks to his youth in the Soviet Union.
“They say: ‘Who knows where this conflict can go?'” he said. “I’ve literally written prescriptions to patients telling them to avoid watching the news.”
Varshavski had already been training for his first professional boxing match, a May 14 pay-per-view bout in Tampa called Creator Clash against a fellow YouTube star called IDubbbz.
He’s now decided to donate all proceeds from the fight to GlobalGiving’s Ukraine Crisis Fund, a charity that has won high marks from independent watchdogs for effectiveness and integrity.
Win or lose, Dr. Mike will keep on talking about Ukraine, along with the day-to-day health woes that have made him one of the nation’s most popular medical communicators.
