Dr. Jay Feldman, a first-year resident at AdventHealth, is in hot water with the hospital after writing questionable social media posts and endorsing several products, one of which is from a supplement company he’s involved with.
In an interview with the Orlando Sentinel, Feldman said he was remorseful about his online posts and that he would no longer endorse products. He didn’t disclose what disciplinary actions the hospital has taken against him.
The hospital also didn’t share his status, citing the privacy of personnel matters.
“When we learned of the social media posts, we took several swift measures to address the situation and continue to investigate the matter,” an AdventHealth spokeswoman said in a statement. “Our medical trainees are held to the highest standards and are expected to cultivate an environment of inclusion, safety and trust among our patients and greater community. The posts are not a reflection of AdventHealth, our mission, values or standards.”
As of Friday, Feldman, a doctor of osteopathy and a family medicine resident, was listed on the hospital’s residency website but doesn’t appear in the hospital’s Doctor Finder tool.
Feldman’s posts have been about a wide range of topics, mostly non-controversial, but a few of them have drawn criticism online.
For example, in a 2012 post on Twitter, he wrote, “Watched my patient code and die right in front of me.. Solid day."
“Just did my first death pronouncement. Opening a dead persons [sic] eyes and staring into them is the most insane thing ever," he wrote on Twitter a few months ago.
And in his most recent post on Instagram, which caught the attention of the hospital, he wrote, “This one is for all the male medical students and residents that have been told to leave for the pelvic exam, who have been ignored during your OB/GYN rotation while the girls get to do all the learning. No more!!! Walk into that room with confidence! Show interest to your attending. You may never get another chance to learn this critical part of medicine! Don’t blow it. Stand up for yourself.”
During the interview on Friday, Feldman said, “The goal of the post was really to encourage men to actually take better interest in gynecological training. ... It was never meant to say, obviously, make the woman uncomfortable to get your training. That’s not something that I believe at all."
“[The post] has had ramifications that I never imagined," he said.
Feldman has also endorsed several products over the years, including supplements made by Rave Doctor, which is registered under the name Elimbix in Florida and for which he is an authorized representative. The company sells supplements geared toward people who go to raves and electronic dance music festivals.
It was in 2017 when Feldman’s social media presence first caught the attention of Sarah Mojarad, an engineering writing and medical education professor at the University of Southern California.
Feldman was then a fourth-year medical student at Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine in New York and Mojarad noticed he was promoting a teeth whitening kit on his Instagram account.
“I think when they’re wearing scrubs, their white coats, things like that behavior is troublesome. It jeopardizes the trust that the public has in medical professionals,” said Mojarad.
She’s created a term for doctors who promote or sell products online: White Coat Marketing.
She continued to follow Feldman’s posts and online activities and used them as case studies for her students. This week, she wrote a Twitter thread raising issues with his involvement with Rave Doctors and its products.
She wrote that Feldman claims that he created the products when he was in medical school.
“If the supplements were being sold at that point, I’m concerned that he didn’t have the educational background to state that a medical professional helped create the product. In my opinion, it over inflates his expertise and it’s misleading the public,” she wrote in one tweet.
On Friday, Feldman said that the company complies with all the FDA guidelines.
“Do I think it was wrong to endorse [the products] as a doctor? I do,” he said.
While major medical organizations, including the American Medical Association, have social media guidelines, Mojarad said they need to be more specific.
And although most schools and institutions have social media policies and training, a one-time lecture isn’t enough, Mojarad said.
She’s been developing a program that’s for four years and it meets medical students at each level of their training.
“My goal is to influence universities, hospitals, and organization to train constituents about professional social media usage," she said.
Feldman said he didn’t know what he could and could not do online.
“No one ever teaches you how to do these things. There was never any formal training and so you just kind of figure it out as you go along,” he said. “It makes a lot of sense that I shouldn’t be using my medical degree as a platform to sell products. But no one teaches you this stuff.”
Before taking down his social media accounts this week, Feldman had more than 100,000 followers on Instagram. He also has a podcast, a YouTube channel in addition to Rave Doctor and smaller online businesses.
He’s among the growing number of medical students and young doctors who are considered influencers and are raising new ethical questions for institutions that educate or hire them.
“Policies and procedures and ethics always lag behind what’s happening in reality,” said Dr. Mike Sevilla, a family physician in Ohio who has been teaching social medial literacy to doctors for more than a decade. “And when we figure out what kind of policies and procedures and rules to put in there, it’s kind of too late for some of these cases.”
Sevilla said hospitals and schools need to do a better job at vetting the online profiles of their candidates.
“A lot of hospitals and residency programs don’t even Google their applicants and don’t even know that they have hundreds of thousands of followers,” said Sevilla. “They don’t know what they’re getting. All they know is what their test scores are and what their official resume is.”
After taking down his social media accounts on Wednesday, Feldman reactivated his Twitter account on Friday, starting with an apology post. (screenshot)
After taking down his social media accounts on Wednesday, Feldman reactivated his Twitter account on Friday, starting with an apology post. (screenshot)
Feldman, who is bringing his social media accounts back online after a brief hiatus, now is distancing himself from Rave Doctor.
“If I was asked to take my name off of the registration of the company, that would be fine,” he said. “Obviously, medicine is my first priority.”
Using himself as an example, he said there may be a need “to have a moderator to control what goes up, which is something that I’ve actually been thinking of doing — creating kind of a network of social media moderators that you can use to make sure this doesn’t happen to anybody else.”