What do boy bands, burnout, and bedside manner have in common? According to Dr. J Mack Slaughter—more than you think. In this episode, emergency medicine physician, musician, and social media creator Dr. J Mack joins Dr. Michael Jerkins to unpack his unlikely path from pop performer to practicing medicine, and how creativity still fuels his career today.

Dr. J Mack opens up about what led him to leave the entertainment industry, start over as a pre-med student, and ultimately find a way to merge both passions through his nonprofit, Music Meets Medicine. From the emotional toll of COVID-19 to his advocacy around EM residency reform and healthcare worker mental health, he shares how creating content online has helped him reclaim his voice and fight burnout, while educating the public along the way.

We explore the broken incentives in healthcare, how profit-driven systems are failing both doctors and patients, and why giving doctors the tools to speak out is more important than ever. Whether you’re a clinician craving inspiration or just someone who wants to understand the person behind the white coat, this episode hits all the right notes.

Here are five takeaways from the conversation with Dr. J Mack Slaughter:

1. Creativity and Medicine Can Coexist—and Thrive Together

Dr. J Mack Slaughter’s journey from boy band performer to emergency medicine physician highlights how creative passions can enhance, not hinder, a medical career. Through his nonprofit, Music Meets Medicine, and his social media presence, he’s found ways to integrate music and storytelling into patient care and public education.

2. Burnout and Mental Health in Healthcare Need Urgent Attention

Dr. Slaughter emphasizes the emotional toll of working in emergency medicine, especially during COVID-19. He advocates for mental health support for healthcare workers, sharing how content creation became a therapeutic outlet and a way to reclaim his voice amid burnout.

3. Systemic Issues in Healthcare Demand Physician Advocacy

The episode dives into broken incentives in the U.S. healthcare system, particularly around emergency medicine residency reforms and profit-driven hospital models. Dr. Slaughter encourages doctors to speak out, despite the risks, and highlights how social media can amplify those voices.

4. Social Media Can Be a Powerful Tool for Education and Change

Dr. Slaughter uses platforms like TikTok and Instagram not just for entertainment, but to educate the public, combat misinformation, and advocate for systemic reform. He stresses the importance of authenticity and passion in content creation, rather than chasing trends or algorithms.

5. Small Acts of Compassion Make a Big Impact

Whether it’s looking a patient in the eye and saying, “I’m sorry this happened to you,” or playing music during a loved one’s chemo session, Dr. Slaughter reminds us that human connection is at the heart of medicine. His story is a testament to how empathy and presence can transform care.

Transcript

J Mack Slaughter:

When I left entertainment, in my brain, I was leaving entertainment forever. Because you had to live in LA or you had to live in New York to work in entertainment. There really weren’t other pockets where you could do that as a career. And I was like, well, I’m moving back home. I’m going to become a doctor. This is it.

Michael Jerkins:

Welcome back to another episode of the podcast for doctors by doctors. I’m Dr. Michael Jerkins, and I am solo again this episode without the one and only Dr. Ned Palmer today. Ned finds himself doing some hospitalist work out West and was not able to join us today. But that still means we have an amazing episode today.

I love talking to doctors who have different stories, different backgrounds, different perspectives, and today is no exception for that. Someone who’s at a very unique vantage point into healthcare right now, especially given all of the recent changes from the one big beautiful bill and what that means for lots of things, but including emergency rooms and hospitals.

So, an emergency medicine physician, which is great—but not every day do you talk to an emergency medicine physician who also happened to be someone in a touring musical group? I don’t know if they call it musical group—it sounds like it’s some sort of group from the 1800s with a medicine show. No, it’s not that. It is someone who’s a child actor, child performer, musician, started not-for-profits, molding medicine and music together.

So, very interesting background, very interesting perspectives, and someone who has a wide audience online as an influencer as well. So really excited for Dr. J. Mack Slaughter to be with us today. And let’s go ahead and get to this interview. We are joined by the one and only Dr. J. Mack Slaughter. There he is. He’s an emergency medicine physician, but not only that—he’s more than that. He has over a million followers online.

Also, he happens to have toured the country in a boy band, just like every other emergency medicine doctor, and was featured in the 20th Century feature film Fat Albert, which I’m super excited to ask about. He later went on to fuse his passion for music and medicine by starting the not-for-profit Music Meets Medicine, which has done some awesome stuff—raised over $500,000 for music therapy at children’s hospitals, and has worked with various not-for-profits to raise over $2 million for cancer research as well. Pretty…

JMS:

Just like every other doc.

MJ:

Unbelievable. Welcome to the podcast.

JMS:

Great to be here, man. Thanks for having me, brother.

MJ:

Yes, I think we have to start with the obvious. Walk us through how you go from boy band to emergency medicine physician. I have lots of questions, but I’m dying to hear the answer.

JMS:

So basically I grew up in this really musical family. My two older sisters would sing and perform on stage, and my dad would play guitar and perform on stage. So I grew up in this like family, like pop singing group thing. So I was literally three years old when I got put on stage, and that was just a normal part of my life. And I did, you know, performances and theater and stuff.

And then I auditioned for a boy band that was being put together on this radio show called the Kidd Kraddick Morning Show, which was huge in Dallas-Fort Worth, and then ended up being nationally syndicated after that. And, you know, it was kind of ahead of its time. Like now, people in the comments section may vote on what’s gonna happen next or whatever, but like back in the day it was like TV and radio—people would, you know, put content out there and there was not like a bi-directional thing, but the audience voted on who got into this boy band.

And so they felt kind of ownership over who was in the band and what the band would sing and everything. So it was this radio experiment that turned into a real band. Like we had 4,000 people show up to our first show. And then next thing we knew, the radio DJ hooked us up. We were opening up for Bon Jovi, and we toured with Destiny’s Child, and it was a crazy whirlwind, man.

MJ:

So that was from what age to what age? How old are you?

JMS:

So I was 15 when I started in that group, and I lied. You had to be 16 to be in the band, but I just made up a random birthday, and that was my identity for the band. Then 17 is when kind of all the boy bands seemed like they were phasing out, you know?

It’s a very cyclical thing with the boy bands, and that was the end of that wave. And I was like, okay, let’s not be in a boy band when we’re 40—let’s move on. And that’s what took me out to LA, and I did TV and film for a little while before ultimately deciding to become a doctor.

MJ:

So can I ask—because this is so fascinating—I hear a lot of stories about doctors, and it’s interesting, right? A lot of people do various things. I always say, especially when I was in academics, that some of the best residents were people who had worked before.

But normally when I say “worked,” I mean like they were an EMT or they did nursing—but normally it’s not child actor. But I imagine that also probably added some skills to your medical training. Can you talk a little bit about that? How did some of those past experiences influence how you learned to be a doctor?

JMS:

That’s a really interesting way to put it, and I absolutely think that that’s true. When you have had prior experiences before your medical training—or even just as practicing as a physician—you’re bringing unique perspectives and unique skill sets to the job of being a doctor. And this is gonna sound crazy, but the closest that I feel to being on stage in front of tens of thousands of people is when I am in a trauma bay and somebody comes in that’s just sick as not, and, you know, they’re younger, and it’s like, man—like all of your mental preparations come down to this moment right now. And it’s like the spotlight’s on you.

And fortunately, when you’re in a critical situation like that in the emergency department, you have a bunch of team members who immediately go into action. But it’s very orchestrated. And if you’ve played through these scenarios in your head—like rehearsed—like I would for a show or something like that, then things play out so much better. And so there’s actually this really good correlation between the two in my head.

Additionally, a lot of the acting that I did back in the day—because I was on a TV show for a year, it was a sitcom, and then like you mentioned, I was in a movie—there is a lot of putting yourself in a certain headspace before you talk to a person about a new cancer diagnosis, or even before you just greet them for the first time. Because they’re in the emergency department, and they’re scared. They truly think they have an emergency.

Now when you’re working in the ER all day every day, we get a little lackadaisical, because we know a very small percentage of what comes into the emergency department actually ends up being a truly life-threatening emergency. So we can be a little numb to it. But if we act like it’s no big deal when we walk into the room, patients don’t like it.

And so you kind of have to put yourself in that mindset of: they feel like this could be the last day of their life, and you have to meet them at that level. And once everything’s warmed up a little bit, and the tests are back and everything’s looking good, then you get to kind of connect on a more happy, laid-back basis. But until then, you gotta put on your serious face.

MJ:

So with your experience, you went through the same rite of passage all of us did in trying to figure out what the heck—which specialty you were going to pick. We actually had an interesting episode with Dr. Josh Daly, who’s done a lot of thought and research on what influences our decisions on that specialty choice.

How did you land on emergency medicine? From a very simplified perspective—and this might not be true—but you know, when you have the med students rotating with you, after a few hours you can kind of guess which one they’re probably going to pick. And they all say med-peds, which is what I am.

JMS:

They’re like, I wanna be just like you when I grow up. You’re like, don’t flatter me.

MJ:

I don’t want to be just like you. I can bench press 500 pounds and I love bones, but I’m not… yeah, right. So like, how did you land on emergency medicine? Is it just the thrill, the kind of adrenaline rush that you got with performing? Like, how did you land on it?

JMS:

Well, to tie in your earlier question—which was like, how did you go from boy band to being a doctor—I reached a point after I was in the boy band, I had moved out to LA, I had been in some projects out there and made a good amount of money. More money than I would ever make in a short amount of time for the rest of my life.

Actors get paid very well—but how long until you get paid well again as an actor? That’s the question that was in my head. I was like, I got lucky. I did really well so far, but am I going to be able to count on this income one day when I’m 41 and I have three kids and a wife—which that’s where I am now—and so I’m really happy with how things ended up playing out.

But at that point, I’m like, okay, I know I don’t want to be stuck in this scenario and not be able to provide for my family—what else do I do? And right around the same time, my sister was working as an ER nurse and just telling me the most incredible stories.

There’s one in particular that will just always stick out in my head of a guy who ended up taking a stab wound to the neck in a non-trauma facility. And the patient comes in and the ER doc essentially throws on a glove and just grabs this dude’s carotid to keep him from bleeding out right on the spot. There happens to be a vascular surgeon in-house that had just finished up an operation—not a trauma facility, they’re not ready for that—but there’s no way you’re going to be able to transport either, in a helicopter or an ambulance, holding a carotid artery and bouncing around. It’s a pretty dangerous situation to be in. And they were able to go to the OR, and this doctor wheeled all the way to the OR with the patient until vascular ended up kind of taking over. And I was like, I think I want to be that guy. What do I have to do?

And it was a lot, you know?

MJ:

You started from scratch—like no pre-med. You basically heard the story and were like, I’m doing the whole thing.

JMS:

That’s what I want to be. That’s what I want to do with my life, yeah.

And there’s another side of it too, where with acting, I kind of started to get more of a bird’s-eye view on what I was doing. Because I basically had a break in between—it was just like boy band, TV show, movie—and then there was a minute there where I wasn’t working.

And actually, I was getting paid to do nothing. This is back when LA kind of had a lot of extra cash laying around, and they had paid me six figures to not work for any other network. So I was getting paid to not work as like a 19, 20-year-old kid.

All my friends were like, this is the best situation ever, right? And I was like, not really. Because I needed something to do every day. I wanted to grow. I wanted stimulation. I wanted to meet people. I wanted to do something that mattered.

And then as I was thinking about that more, I was like, well, how much does it matter when you’re on a TV show? I mean, yeah, you’re bringing escapism to people’s lives, but I don’t know. It really was like a quarter-life crisis for me. At like 20 years old, I was like, what am I going to do with the rest of my life? And it better mean something. And I feel like I was able to strike that balance, and I feel so lucky.

MJ:

Wow, good for you. And also I would just think too, right, is if you just had a wild hair in a decade and said, hey, I want to do some acting—in theory, you could do that. In theory. Doing it at 51 and saying I want to be a doctor—it’s a little harder. Not impossible, yeah. But like, I think it sounds like you made a very logical choice. I’m obviously very biased as a doctor myself.

JMS:

Well, and it’s interesting too because when I left entertainment, in my brain, I was leaving entertainment forever.

Because you had to live in LA or you had to live in New York to work in entertainment. There really weren’t other pockets where you could do that as a career. And I was like, well, I’m moving back home. I’m gonna become a doctor. This is it. But I didn’t foresee this social media age where anybody can film themselves on a fricking iPhone and send it out to the whole world. I had no idea that future was coming. And man, I’m so glad it did because now, you know, there was a little bit of…

Once I finished residency and I was working as an attending, I loved being an ER doctor and I loved my wife and I loved my kids. I was able to provide a house for my family. But something was missing. Something was missing, and nobody could fill that void but entertaining, you know? And now…

We can do it from anywhere. And so now I get to do that, and I get to create. And every time I create a video, it feels like I’m writing a song. It feels like I’m creating something from scratch, and I have in my head what I want it to be like. But then when it comes out, it’s not exactly like that, and you kind of have to pivot a little bit and be creative to make it work. Even just the creation aspect is very therapeutic and fulfilling for me to where I feel like I didn’t abandon that dream that was so important to me at one point in my life.

MJ:

So did you start the social media, the performing, this kind of scratching that itch in med school? Walk us through how that started.

JMS:

No, you know, not at all. I didn’t do— I mean, I would perform for like my nonprofit fundraisers and I’d be in the hospital singing with patients and stuff. And so I think that’s kind of how I started to scratch that itch a little bit in med school. Let’s do something productive with the skills that I developed for so many years.

But not until COVID really hit did I actually start making content. I was very curious about different social media creators’ pages, but I was like, I’m not the kind of guy who’s just gonna stand up in front of a beautiful waterfall and be like, “Follow me on Instagram.” You know, because that’s what it was. That’s what it used to be. And it wasn’t that long ago. That was like six years ago. It was just: look pretty, have washboard abs, and you get this big following.

But now it’s like personalities and education and experience really, really matter.

MJ:

There’s a lot of doctors that are influencers. Maybe that’s just my feed.

JMS:

There are now. There didn’t used to be, but yes. No, my feed too, dude. It’s just like, that’s all I’m seeing. I’m like, can I get some other content?

MJ:

It’s super interesting. It is. And I applaud those who especially try to engage and educate from a perspective of really fighting misinformation and really trying to come from, I think, an ethical perspective. But it’s exhausting. I cannot imagine how exhausting that is if you really want to do that.

You could easily just make the videos and let the comments be the comments. Walk us through how you actually act as a doctor on social media and not just totally drain yourself.

JMS:

I’m lucky because I usually get to talk about the things that I’m ultimately really passionate about, and I don’t get a lot of that soul-draining response in the comments.

There are a couple times when I do post about stuff and I do get that. And it’s anytime you mention anything about vaccines—it’s like, I don’t even know which one of these accounts are real human beings and which ones are just Russian farm bots there to try to destabilize the U.S. psyche. And I know it, even when it’s anecdotal. I’m like, “You know, this thing about vaccines…” and the comment section blows up and it’s soul-sucking.

I did very early on fight the fight very hard with COVID information. And I was a little bit of a COVID warrior in the beginning. It was draining. It was soul-sucking. And ultimately, it feels a lot like when somebody from the far right is talking to somebody from the far left. Neither of you are going to budge on this, so why are we even doing this?

After a while, I was like, man, I need to start really talking about the things that matter to me and that I think can positively impact people’s lives outside of just COVID. And fortunately, that has done well.

MJ:

And so what are those things? What are you so passionate about that you want to share with the world on social media?

JMS:

I think mental illness of healthcare workers is something that’s super, super important to me. Educating patients and the general population on certain conditions that may or may not need to go to the emergency department.

So when I first started making content, I made a video every single day. It was a very religious thing. Every single day I had to make a video. And I was doing Lives very frequently as well because I was like: grow, grow, grow, grow, grow.

But one, that gets very tiring, and two, you reach a point where you’re like, “Okay, to me it’s not just about growth or just making content to make content. I want to slow down and make things when I want to make things.” So now I just kind of wait for the lightning strikes. When it’s like, “I am so excited to talk about this or to post about this or a news story or whatever it is.” And so that’s what I wait for. I wait for the lightning strike, and then I jump on it and within like 45 minutes, I’ve made a full video with music and captions, and I’m posting it in that moment.

You know, people have content calendars, like “in two months I should have space to be able to post this one thing.” And I’m like, man, you allow yourself to be more intuitive when you just wait for, “This would be a really good time to talk about this.”

MJ:

And I think people genuinely have this built-in thing as humans where you can just sniff out inauthenticity. You know what I mean? I saw your video recently—I don’t know how recent it was—about ACGME changing the requirements for emergency medicine. And I saw it and thought, “This guy has some strong feelings about this,” which I do too. But that’s an example. When was that? I didn’t even know they made that change.

JMS:

Yeah, so that was—I need to actually look, because we’re coming up on the time where the ability to even provide feedback on that situation is closing. So there was a window there, and that’s when I was really trying to push people towards commenting on their website about it. But yeah, that was a couple of months ago. I need to look into that right now.

MJ:

Bring that up in case the people that don’t know—because I honestly didn’t know about it until I saw your video. So maybe educate the listeners.

JMS:

So basically, across the country, some ER residencies are three years and some ER residencies are four years. And traditionally, doctors have been given the choice: do they want to apply to only three-year programs or only four-year programs?

The four-year programs can be more appropriate if you want to go into academic medicine. But if you want to go into academic medicine, you can do a three-year program plus a one-year fellowship, and arguably you have a leg up over somebody who did just the four-year residency.

So, you know, the big question is: is there a better doctor that comes out of that four-year residency, or are they very similar in terms of what we can actually measure once they become doctors? And there were studies done.

And there was not a significant difference. In fact, there was a very slight edge to the people—as far as I forget like test scores or the percentage that ended up passing their boards—the slight edge went to the three-year programs, which you would not expect, right?

So to have so little literature out there on whether there is an advantage to the four-year program versus the three-year, and then the literature that is there points to like maybe there’s an advantage to the three-year—why would we be forcing every single emergency residency across the country to be a four-year program? It makes absolutely no sense. And you can start reading a little bit online, and there are a lot of theories as to the economics behind it, which is so frustrating. Because day in, day out, anytime I’m disappointed by medicine, it’s because there’s been an overreach in terms of profits. And that’s something that just, to my core, gets me really worked up.

And the only real arguments that are out there that are convincing have to do with being able to pay doctors less that are very well trained—to work like dogs for hospital systems.

MJ:

Well, that reminds me—so in MedPeds, the Peds hospitalist is a boarded thing now. You have to do a fellowship now. And I’m like, I just don’t understand what more training I need to be able to treat RSV and then help. Do a good job, because most of your pediatric residency is in the hospital doing general pediatrics.

There’s people listening to this that think I’m an idiot and disagree with it. But to me, it’s just another way to funnel more people—trainees—into these systems to be cheap labor. That’s totally right. And it’s hard on the outside. Look, you and I both know the general public is not going to feel sorry for doctors for almost anything. And I get it. But to describe these things to people that are within, it starts to resonate and maybe lets people think through some of the larger…

JMS:

…to get taken advantage of.

MJ:

…things pushed down on us. And my great theory of all of this is not that great, actually—I just mean large, it’s not actually that sophisticated—is that there’s this large information asymmetry. You have the employers, you have the insurers that have all the information. The doctors, each individual, does not have the information. So thus it’s easy for us to be taken advantage of.

What else are we going to do? Especially when you’re a quarter million, $500,000 in debt. You’re going to be like, “Actually I’m taking a stance against this and I’m going to go work at Starbucks and teach you guys a lesson now.” Yeah. So like, yeah, it’s— or boards. Board exams, right?

JMS:

Yeah. Same thing, yeah, absolutely. We are very much at the mercy of the system, and ultimately the risk to our career and our future can very easily outweigh… or sorry, the benefit to speaking out against these things can very quickly get outweighed by the risk to our future.

MJ:

And also just like you talked about—the soul-sucking exercise of fighting every negative comment—it’s like it’s a soul-sucking exercise for an individual doctor to speak out against one of the largest industries in this country and really feel like they’re making a difference. That is obviously defeatist and I don’t encourage that, but I get why. I get why people are like it.

JMS:

You know, talk about just like current news or being topical with posts and stuff like that—Dr. Elizabeth Potter, who was very outspoken with the way she was being treated by UnitedHealthcare, and then ended up—I forget which major publications and podcasts—but she was kind of all over the media for a little while there. And then just wildly viral on TikTok, Instagram, et cetera.

She just recently found out that UnitedHealthcare had decided not to go in-network with her surgical center, that she had to take out $5 million in loans for. And it could be kind of crushing to that dream of owning her own surgical center. She was potentially going to just drown under the weight of all those loans without being able to get coverage by UnitedHealthcare.

But she, in true Dr. Elizabeth Potter fashion, was just open and honest with the truth and told the internet that. She said, “Look, I’m scared. I have millions of dollars in loans. My whole financial plan for this included being able to do surgeries and insurance cover it. And this is a huge knock to that financial plan. And I may not be able to stay afloat.” And she just looked at the camera and said, “I need your help. I started a GoFundMe.”

And I could—when I saw that, I was like, there is a breast reconstructive surgeon who started a GoFundMe so she can continue her practice because the biggest insurer in the U.S. is allegedly retaliating against her. And I was like, how is this going to play out?

And next thing you knew, man, hundreds of thousands of dollars were rolling in to support her in her fight against big insurance. And I made a video—I don’t know how much I helped. It got a lot of views, and I know it drove a lot of them because I saw it when I first released the video. I saw how much money was in there versus after. And there was a lot added. I’m sure there were other videos and stuff, but it’s cool to see that at least one person who has really put her career on the line to speak out and speak the truth has the support of the entire internet. It’s beautiful.

MJ:

Yeah, that is amazing. And I think it peels back the curtain a little bit, just like we were talking about. Most of the public doesn’t feel sorry for doctors, but once they kind of understand what—especially on the insurance side—happens and then also connect that to how it affects them, as we all know, no one’s really happy with their healthcare. I think people see like, okay, it’s not as if the doctors are in cahoots and planning this master plan and negatively—it’s not that. We are trying our best. We literally have an oath.

JMS:

Like doctors and big insurance and hospital CEOs, and we’re all just like together, you know, in this back room of this fancy restaurant, like—

MJ:

Every time people say that I’m like, have you ever worked at the VA on a Friday afternoon? That’s not actually possible. Love the VA, just saying—sometimes Friday at 5 to getting that echo, you gotta stay two more days to get that echo.

Anyway, I kind of paused on this a little bit. You mentioned this already on the profit side. Talk to us a little bit about this data on how hospital systems have, over the last 10–15 years, treated emergency medicine and emergency medicine groups. And what you see is the future of how EM evolves, especially with for-profit hospitals.

JMS:

You know what? That is a good question. And I would not consider myself an expert in that field because I am currently—knock on wood—in a really good situation working for a nonprofit hospital system and a large national staffing group that really has respected the group that they purchased.

So basically, I was in a group of around 200–250 emergency physicians in Dallas–Fort Worth that was bought out by this very large national staffing company. And we were so worried—they’re going to come in and change everything, and pay is going to go down, and workload is going to go up, and we’re going to be miserable with all these modules.

And I haven’t experienced that. Part of that, I think, is because we were a very well-oiled machine that made the hospitals very happy. We were all very, very hard, efficient workers. And we had better metrics than any of the other groups that they’ve ever looked into nationwide, you know, without sacrificing—because efficiency is obviously very, very important from different perspectives when you’re talking about profits and stuff like that.

But we’ve never had an issue with that because we all have this insane hustle. The whole ER has that hustle. The nurses up front in triage have that hustle. The nurses in back—when we have beds that are held because there aren’t any beds upstairs—we all have that sense of urgency. They’re calling upstairs like, “Why can’t I move this patient upstairs?” We’re all in it together, and it’s a very unique situation. Not all ERs are like that.

You know, there can be a lot of headbutting between the staffing company and the doctors and the hospital system and the nurses. And we just feel very blessed in that respect, to be working in a practice environment where we all are kind of rowing in the same direction. And it’s wonderful.

And I knock on wood because this can’t be my whole career. You know, I want it to be. But I also know—I’m very realistic about the fact that there are a lot of ER doctors out there that are suffering and that are not happy with where they work and who they work for. Like, man, my heart goes out to them because, at the end of the day, it’s a really important job and it’s a really hard job. And if you don’t have the kind of support and kind of the teamwork that ER really needs, it can be a very soul-sucking job as well.

MJ:

Obviously, recently, Medicaid cuts were signed into law, phased over the next few years, that largely affect all sorts of things in the healthcare system. How do you feel these Medicaid cuts will affect emergency rooms across the country?

JMS:

Well, emergency rooms are the safety net of medicine—and really of society, honestly. If it’s the middle of the night and there’s a homeless person who’s about to freeze to death, back in the day, they would find a cathedral. That was their sanctuary. You know, that’s where they would find a blanket and maybe a little bit of food, and some warmth, and a kind person to help lift their spirits. That doesn’t really exist in America anymore.

So the emergency room has become like the last sanctuary in the U.S. We’re open 24/7 regardless of what your issue is—whether it’s medical or not—we are the safety net. And knowing that, as more and more people may lose insurance coverage—one, from these big cuts to Medicare/Medicaid, but two, just because it’s gotten so effing expensive to do anything in medicine whether you do or don’t have insurance—I think there will be more and more problems that are going to go undiagnosed, untreated.

They’re going to get worse and worse, and they’re going to present at a point where now the resources necessary to control whatever that problem is are going to be significantly more. So I think ultimately, it’s going to bring a lot of higher-acuity patients into the ER who have let something go way too long that could have been fixed early on. And then I think we’re also going to feel the weight of chronic medical issues that go untreated for more and more years. We’re going to be sicker overall as a country. So I’m not excited about it.

MJ:

Yeah, totally agree. And that’s not even including the potential access issues of all the rural hospitals and the rural ERs being already financially strained—and then feeding into the more urban or academic ERs with potentially higher acuity. I’m very nervous, very anxious about that.

JMS:

Yeah, and I can imagine. The first thing that happens when you have budget cuts is you start to cut personnel. And if you’re cutting personnel from an already overstretched ER as far as resources are concerned, there’s going to be a lot more pain and suffering in there.

And I really—my gosh—I got a taste of that during COVID. There was a point where we had gotten through the initial wave of COVID—and it was a god-awful experience for everyone involved, especially in the emergency department and in the ICUs and the COVID units. But when Delta came, when the next wave came, there were so many nurses that looked at that and were like, “I can’t do it again.”

It wasn’t even like a “don’t want to do it again,” it was like, “I just can’t. I have to choose my mental health and I have to choose my family over my job in the ER right now.” And a lot of bedside nurses quit all at the same time all across the country.

And I remember in my ER specifically, our waiting room was just backing up more and more and more. And that’s one thing usually we’re so good at—keeping that waiting room either empty because we have really good throughput and we’re all hustling as an entire department—or if they’re stuck in the waiting room, we’re still getting labs drawn and we’re still able to get certain images done with radiology.

So things are moving forward. It’s not just like a dead zone, you know?

But man, when all those nurses left—whoa—during that second wave in COVID, it became this dead zone. And I remember walking through the waiting room and these patients would look at me just like, “Help me.” And in my brain, I was like, “I can’t.” I went to school for 11 years to do this, and I’ve been an ER doctor for—at that point—like seven years, something like that. And there was no amount of training or experience that I had that could make up for the lack of staffing.

We need our nurses. We rely so heavily on them. Without them, we’re just dead in the water. We’re kind of useless, you know?

MJ:

Thank you for sharing that because I think—you can have hospitals, can have physical rooms, can have physical beds, you can have oxygen, all of these things—but if you don’t actually have the nursing staff to facilitate the delivery of care, none of that actually means anything.

And I think we experienced that in the hospital I was at during that time in the COVID units—especially that second wave—it was a lot different, or I felt like, yeah.

JMS:

It was.

MJ:

It’s hard to communicate what that’s like if you weren’t there at the time. And I remember being with the medical students rotating through at that time and they were doing a lot more but also had less training at that time. And so it was just—it was such a crazy moment for all.

JMS:

There’s an interesting interaction between having young physicians or young trainees really step up to the plate and how rapidly they evolve and grow as physicians and as clinicians.

Because in my residency, they had interns—I don’t know if this is still the case, but this was a long time ago, like 2013—but I was in a burn ICU by myself as like a two-month-old doctor with a pager on my belt at like 3 a.m. I was just terrified sitting in this big, long, dark conference room by myself at 3 a.m.

I’d get these pages like, “Pressure is 60 over 40,” and I’d be like, “Oh my God.” It was terrifying. But at the same time, it made me put my big-boy pants on and step up to the plate because my patients needed me. And I became a much better doctor.

And of course, I had anyone that I could call at any moment. There were doctors everywhere around the hospital. If there was something truly acute and there wasn’t someone in my immediate vicinity, I think looking back on it, it was a very safe situation. But they gave me first-line responsibility for some of the sickest patients in the hospital in the burn ICU. And I just grew so much as a physician at that time.

And so like you mentioned, having your med students and your interns and maybe second-years having to step up and fulfill this higher responsibility—it can be very stressful, but it can also really—you know, like pressure, enough pressure, you’re making diamonds out of carbon, right? So it’s kind of something similar to that, I think.

MJ:

I agree. Our month similar was—when you’re an intern, you would be the only resident in the—I’m not going to say which hospital—ICU overnight. The general medicine ICU had 12 beds. And that was like the… But again, we had attendings we’d call, the fellow that was in the hospital right up the road, in theory. Yes, but it does—it does make you step up.

Well, I do want to ask about your amazing work—

JMS:

You had so much backup.

MJ:

Your not-for-profit work. Can I—can you explain what Music Meets Medicine is and how it’s evolved over time?

JMS:

So, Music Meets Medicine is a nonprofit that I started a long time ago. It was when I was in my undergrad, actually. And I was inspired by my mom’s chemo sessions because she would have these long, painful chemo sessions, and then there was this one treatment in particular that she would get that could turn your fingernails and your toenails black and they could fall off. And so, to potentially prevent that side effect, you’d put your fingers and toes in ice. You’d have vasoconstriction—you’d constrict down those blood vessels and less of that toxic drug would get to the fingertips and to the tips of the toenails, to the toes.

And, you know, my mom had already—we’d already shaved my mom’s head, she had both of her breasts surgically removed, and this was like one of the last pieces of objective femininity that she had. And she was like, “I’ll be damned if I’m going to lose these fingernails.” Right? And so, for the whole hour that she was getting this drug, she had her fingers and toes in ice.

And if you remember being a kid and you bump your head and you put some ice on it—give it two minutes and you’re like, “Take this thing off of me,” right? But my mom has my willpower, and she just held those fingers and toes in ice for that hour.

And I’m like this very self-centered, early 20s kid, you know, and watching my mom suffer like that—it was one of the slowest, most painful hours I’d ever experienced in my life. And my sisters and I had the idea—you remember the band that we were in, our family band when we were little—of bringing our instruments. And so we brought our instruments to that chemo session the next time. And that hour just flew by. There was just so much love and happiness and joy in the room.

Like, the room was unrecognizable from the week before that we had experienced. And the thing that changed was music, man. And I was just like—there was this power that I felt that I couldn’t ignore. And I felt almost selfish to just keep it to myself. I was like, “I have to figure out how to share this with more people because this is the secret that maybe a lot of people could benefit from.”

And so, I didn’t know how to start a nonprofit or who to talk to. And I didn’t know what manifesting was at the time, but I manifested that shit. I just started talking about it more and more, and people would kind of point me in the right directions. And I was like, “I’m going to do this thing, I just don’t know how to do this thing.” And people helped me figure it out.

And next thing I knew, I was filling out this stack of papers for the IRS and didn’t know what the heck I was doing. But my friend’s dad was a lawyer who could help me, and this other friend’s dad was a CPA, and I put everybody together. And I made a 501(c)(3), you know, in my early 20s.

And then, you know, first fundraiser got like $1,000 or something like that, and I was like, “We’re going to be able to do so much good with this,” and then it was just gone immediately. And I was like, “We’re going to need to raise more money.” But then, just over the years—just kept going, just kept going and kept trying.

At one point, we raised $150,000 to open up a jam room at Dallas Children’s Hospital. It’s still there now. There’s a sweet jam room where kids can pick up different instruments—an electronic drum set, and a lot of them you can put on headphones in case you’re embarrassed so other people can’t hear it.

You know, the music therapy program there was budding. Had a couple of music therapists, but they didn’t have anywhere to go. They’d be literally writing a song with a child with a terminal diagnosis and they were in the hallway of the hospital. And so we gave them a place to escape to and to musically experiment in.

It was just—I’m just so proud that that ended up working out because I lost a lot of sleep over, “How am I going to raise this much money?” But it manifested.

MJ:

Love that story. You saw need, experienced it, and then manifested it. That’s my verb of the day.

JMS:

There’s different names for it. People call it like secreting or manifesting, or I forget—there’s some other words out there and people have vision boards or whatever. And I didn’t know about any of those words or any of those kinds of approaches.

But if there’s something that you deeply, deeply want to accomplish—or some goal or some vision that you have in your head—and you just don’t lose sight of that, and you just talk to a bajillion people, eventually somebody’s going to be like, “I know this way that I could help you.”

And it’s just these baby steps, man. Just these baby steps over time. And next thing you know you’re like, “Whoa, look what we did!” And now we’ve raised over half a million dollars for music.

MJ:

That’s right. That is crazy. That’s the thing too about doctors—we have great ideas. We are in a position where people will listen to us, rightly or wrongly, but not all the time do we have the tools to know how to do things outside of the clinical realm.

And so I love your story because it is like, “Hey, you saw a need. People will listen to you.” And then you asked enough people where the expertise to actually get it done happened. But it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.

I think that’s the biggest thing with doctors. Our mentors are mostly all clinicians in medicine. Not a bad thing, but it’s hard to see what it actually looks like to do these kinds of things.

JMS:

We’re so good at working within systems, but we’re not as good at creating our own systems.

MJ:

Yes, we have great ideas. And that’s like the Panacea thing, right? Ned and I basically lived through being broke and were very frustrated at just talking to a normal bank and they treated you like a child.

JMS:

Your story is crazy, by the way. I can’t even believe that. Like, you just wanted like a $2,500 loan to fix your car so you could drive to the hospital and help your patients—and they wouldn’t even give you a $2,500 loan?

MJ:

Yeah, that was me, yeah. It’s like, “Declined,” or “Hey, go ask a grownup.” Because at that time I was on the CVI rotation taking care of heart transplants—the sickest of the sick probably in the hospital. They’re like, “Okay, you’re great. We want you to help this person.” But you’re not that great because I won’t give you two grand. Okay, something’s weird. Can someone explain this to me? And, you know, you learn.

JMS:

I mean, just because you’re an intern doesn’t mean you’re not going to be an attending. To not have just that insight—that this person is worth investing in.

MJ:

Look, it makes no common sense, right? You talked about money—and what I learned is that the banks basically have been around with the same business model for several hundred years. And guess what? It makes them money. So why do they need to change?

So then I say, “Okay, that might work for everybody, but we need something specifically for doctors. Here’s the data.” I can talk to you until I’m blue in the face, but I couldn’t do it myself, right? Ned and I tried, tried, tried—couldn’t get it off the ground.

JMS:

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

MJ:

Then a good friend of mine I’ve known since ninth grade was that person—helped it actually manifest. Tyler, our other co-founder, who had all the bank connections and knew banking like the back of his hand. And that’s how it came to be.

This is not meant to plug, but just as another example: seeing problems and saying, “I don’t know, I’m not a banker, I don’t know anything about this,” but over time, you ask, you have conversations, and I just felt very, very strongly about this.

And I just think there are so many good ideas out there lingering with other doctors now. Hopefully, this encourages them to—reach out to us. We might not know how to get it done, but we can find someone that can help. I just think there’s so many great things out there.

JMS:

Yeah, reach out to me. I am very responsive in my DMs. If you have a dream and you just want to brainstorm—I love brainstorming with people. So we might not be able to take a phone call in like a week or something like that, but we’re going to schedule it out and figure out a time. And yeah, I love when people have a dream and have a goal and they just keep pushing until they bring it to fruit.

MJ:

Well, I have some rapid fire questions for you. Some are also true and false. And then we’ll wrap it up from here. But I’m excited. It ends up these are almost never rapid fire because I always want to talk more about it—but they’re intended to be.

All right. Rapid fire. First: worst piece of advice you were given in medical training?

JMS:

Okay. Yeah, they’re supposed to be.

Worst piece of advice I was given in medical training? This is supposed to be rapid fire? This is a hard one. Oh, you made me nervous. No. Well, I will say the worst thing you can do as a person taking care of trainees is to belittle them. And I was belittled a lot by a particular trauma surgeon at my training hospital.

Belittling your trainees—man, with all of the stress that you’re under and everything you’re going through, I don’t know—especially now looking back on it, being an attending, I’m like, I can’t believe that a-hole treated me like that. But hurt people hurt people. So someone hurt him along the way. They had to. That guy was evil.

MJ:

Yes. Yeah, I could talk about that all day. Totally agree. Now on the positive side—what’s the best piece of advice you were given in medical training?

JMS:

Along the way—and this, you know, it’s interesting because it actually isn’t even clinical. It’s more about connecting with the patients.

Anytime you’re in the emergency department, you’re trying to be fast. You’re trying to be as efficient as possible because ultimately the waiting room is the most dangerous place to be. And the only way to get people out of the waiting room is to move people out of the beds that are in the emergency department.

And so you’re going fast, fast, fast, fast, fast. But I would do this thing where I’d say something like, “I’m sorry this happened to you. Hopefully everything’s okay.” But as I was kind of saying that, and it might not have been those exact words—but paraphrased—I’d be walking away.

And so I meant that. I meant that like, “I’m sorry this happened to you,” but they didn’t feel that sincerity from me because I was walking away. And someone told me, “Just look them in the eyes and tell them that. Because I know you mean that, J-Mack—show them that you mean that.”

And so I started doing that. I do that with every single patient. It’s my favorite part of the patient encounter. I just look them right in the eyes and I’m like, “Man, I’m sorry that this happened to you today.” And I mean it. And they feel that I mean it. And they know—they feel comfortable with the quality of care that they’re going to get on a deeper level.

MJ:

I mean, we’re people helping people, right? So you’re treating the person like a person.

JMS:

And that just shows more of—you’re actually a person. You’re not this—man, especially the more and more AI kind of tries to take over our job or does take over our job—the more and more moments like that, I think, are going to be truly valued.

MJ:

Someone was talking about the AI piece and I was like, “If there’s an AI that can convince my six-year-old daughter to open her mouth at the pediatric dentist’s office—that is who I’m investing in.” Until that happens, I feel pretty good about my job.

But yeah, so, okay, let me ask you this: if you could make one change in the healthcare system that would prevent the most ER visits—in a good way—what would that change be?

JMS:

Honestly, it would be to have a functioning primary care structure in the US. I think the practices that are out there are doing their very best, but ultimately they’re just outnumbered, man.

The population keeps exploding at an exponential rate, and we’re training new doctors at this little linear rate. I mean, it’s just barely increasing year over year. And so, they’re just outnumbered. And so the current system that we have in place is just—it’s just not built to truly be there for every American.

MJ:

Yeah, I hope that we will continue to see more doctors take control over their lives and hang their own shingle. It’s hard. We love supporting independent doctors, especially in the primary care side if they can.

Because you can—anyway, that’s a whole different topic. But it’s hard, right? It’s hard, especially when the systems buy the primary care clinics to save or make money by all the referrals. And actually, they lose money if they prevent the hospitalizations.

Right? A good primary care system… totally misaligned. Anyway, this is not my podcast, your podcast.

JMS:

The incentives aren’t aligned. Yeah, it’s a—

No, no, no, this is your podcast, bro. I’m the guest. You’re the host, dude. You’re the host. No, I’m 100% with you. And it makes it very difficult for the individual physicians to have any sort of leverage over big insurance, you know? And so that’s one of the issues right there—single physician voices are just getting so overpowered by the monopoly that exists.

MJ:

Well, little more lighthearted rapid fire—song. If Emergency Medicine had a theme song, what would it be?

JMS:

I’m just a little silhouette of a man, got a mouse, got a mouse… I think Bohemian Rhapsody, dude. Okay, it’s just—we’re all over the place. Is it an opera song? Is it a rock song? You know, is it like a ballad? What are we dealing with? It’s like schizophrenic in a way. Like that’s what the ER is. That’s how I feel every day. At the end of the song, it’s like, “Whoa, that was an intense song.”

MJ:

I love that. I don’t know if there is a better answer. It makes total sense. I think you’re the first person to sing on this podcast, so kudos. Music does meet medicine, like we said.

JMS:

I promise I’m a better singer than that.

MJ:

No, that was great. Your falsetto is on point. All right, best boy band of all time?

JMS:

Boy band of all time for me has got to be NSYNC because when I was in a boy band myself, that’s who I wanted us to be. They weren’t ever as big as the Backstreet Boys—everybody knew them to that same level—but when you look at how many albums were sold and this and that, the Backstreet Boys blew all those statistics out of the water. But there was something about the talent in NSYNC that I was like, “Oh man, these dudes are next level.” Sorry, Backstreet Boys.

MJ:

Yeah, well, no, that’s the thing. So I’m from Memphis. So everyone loves Justin Timberlake. He’s our guy. So—I’m pretty sure he’s in NSYNC, right? I just want to make sure I didn’t mess that up. OK, good.

JMS:

Yeah, no, you got that right. That would have been really embarrassing.

MJ:

That would have been—but I would have owned it. I would have owned it. New Kids on the Block—I knew he wasn’t in that. And what’s the one Nick Lachey was in?

JMS:

98 Degrees. We opened for them.

MJ:

Really? Did you like, show them out? Like you performed better and they’re like, “Hey, we don’t want these kids anymore”?

JMS:

I mean, I’d like to think we did—you’d have to ask the people that were there.

MJ:

Are there YouTube videos of this? Like I want to watch these.

JMS:

Yeah, there are YouTube videos of us performing at some pretty big shows, which are pretty cool. You see fans holding signs and stuff like that.

MJ:

Can you instruct us what to type in the YouTube search?

JMS:

I mean, maybe like—so the name of the boy band was very embarrassing. I did not name the boy band, but it was Sons of Harmony. But one of my favorite videos that I’ve seen out there is Sons of Harmony, Six Flags, when we performed at Six Flags. We performed a couple of times there. There’s an amphitheater—maybe 10,000 people, 15, something like that. But it was a lot, man. And I just remember the first time I performed in front of that crowd, my mind was just like, whoa. It was like I blacked out. I did everything right, you know? I hit all my dance moves and everything, and I was singing when I was supposed to. But I was having an out-of-body experience. It was insane. That was next level, dude.

MJ:

And that’s on YouTube for all of us to see—that moment?

JMS:

It is. Yeah, it is. Forever.

MJ:

Very cool. Well, true or false: residency was harder than being in a boy band?

JMS:

False. Much harder being in a boy band. And here’s why: being in the boy band and being on stage and stuff like that—all that stuff was fun. But being in a boy band as a teenager was hard because it helped in the ladies department—careful about how I phrase that—the ladies loved me. It helped in the ladies department, but the dudes did not like it at all. And so I got a lot of negativity, you know, shot my way. It prepared me for being a social media influencer, I guess, because we do at times get a lot of negativity thrown our way and you’ve got to have thick skin.

MJ:

That is fascinating. I’m fascinated by that. That could be its own podcast episode. True or false: most doctors on social media are in it for the right reasons?

JMS:

True. I would say most doctor social media influencers are in it for the right reasons.

MJ:

You think true? Why do you think so?

JMS:

You know, if we were just in it to make a buck, then we’re in the wrong field, honestly. You can make a lot of money on social media, but spending your time and energy on one of the more tried-and-true paths might be a better idea—like going into investments, VC funds, or something. There are things out there with a much better likelihood of success than being a social media influencer.

And also, it’s the Wild West—which I kind of love. I love that we’re the first people to really do this in the world of medicine. And how do we dance that line between allowing ourselves to benefit financially but not sacrificing our morals along the way?

It’s interesting to be in this space right now, but I think the vast majority of doctors on social media are doing it for the right reasons. They want to educate the public.

There’s another benefit to it as well. A lot of people look at social media and they’re like, “You’re just doing it because you’re trying to make money.” But so many doctors are just burnt out, you know? And it feeds the soul in a way.

If you’re in a practice that feels like Groundhog Day—feels like the same day over and over again—it really switches things up. It gives you a new perspective on what you’re doing too. You’re looking at certain presentations and thinking, “This would be really interesting to talk about online,” or “I keep seeing this misconception over and over—maybe this is something worth shooting later today.”

So it can breathe new life into your practice as well.

MJ:

And people will listen to you, right? We talked about that. That’s such a position of responsibility too. That makes sense. Well, let me ask you the last true or false: true or false—you will one day drop another album?

JMS:

That is false. But my kids are very talented, and I’ve been working with them since they were very, very young to play different instruments and perform. All three of them can play and sing at the same time—11-year-old, 9-year-old, and a 5-year-old. The 5-year-old obviously has a little ways to go.

But now, will they put out an album and will I help with it? That is very likely. But the boy band’s not putting out another album.

MJ:

That is amazing. Well, we ask every guest this question to end—every single guest. We take in lots of information every day. We don’t always change our mind every day from this information. So let me ask you: what is one thing that you have recently changed your mind about?

JMS:

Well, this is going to sound like it’s a plug for an app that I use all the time, but I’m going to go ahead and do it because I do love the software.

At one point, I thought that I was never going to be able to live without a program called UpToDate. It’s a program that a lot of doctors use to access up-to-date information.

About six months ago, I was exposed to a program called Open Evidence. Open Evidence is able to search this vast library of medical information—very legitimate medical journals: JAMA, New England Journal of Medicine, etc.—and make truly up-to-the-minute recommendations based on the literature and guidelines that are out there.

And I started using it and was like, “Yeah, but it’ll never be UpToDate.” Then UpToDate—our hospital system or staffing company—stopped paying for it. And I was like, “What am I going to do?”

I started using Open Evidence more and realized—I don’t miss UpToDate anymore.

MJ:

Mind it too.

JMS:

I’ve changed my tune on it big time. And it’s free, which is incredible.

MJ:

I think we should probably put a watermark on this part of the video, or else I think we just made an ad for Open Evidence. I’ve talked about it a lot on this podcast, actually.

Well, I appreciate you, Dr. J Mack Slaughter. Thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule to talk to us today. Tell us where we can find you online. Everyone wants more J Mack Slaughter in their life—where can they find you?

JMS:

That’s the truth, man. Can’t get enough of this swoop, can ya? Just @dr.jmac on all social media platforms.

MJ:

Well, I appreciate it—and we’ll talk soon.

JMS:

My man, this was fun!

MJ:

Thanks for joining us this episode. You can catch the podcast For Doctors, By Doctors on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and all the other major podcasting platforms. If you enjoyed this episode or learned anything here today, please take a moment to give us a rating and subscribe so that you don’t miss a single episode release.

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