KITE senior scientist Dr. Andrea Furlan has created a wildly successful YouTube channel devoted to helping people with chronic pain
Clad in a plain yellow shirt, black slacks and sensible shoes, Dr. Andrea Furlan stands in front of a white, unadorned wall in her home, looks straight into her smartphone camera and addresses her viewers: “My name is Andrea Furlan. I’m a specialist in physical medicine and rehabilitation. Today, I’m going to talk about osteoporosis.” So begins the simple video that, three years ago, turned its slightly tentative creator into a YouTube powerhouse with nearly 700,000 followers.
From the moment you hit play on one of Dr. Furlan’s videos, it’s clear she isn’t like most YouTubers who do wild stunts, cook crazy meals or unbox children’s toys. Her videos are more community television style, complete with rudimentary graphics – far from the slick production many professional streamers employ today. And while you likely wouldn’t call her an influencer, with many of her videos getting millions of views, she is certainly influential.
The unlikely YouTuber also has a day job that doesn’t involve endorsement deals or rubbing shoulders with celebrities. She’s a professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of Toronto, a staff physician at the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute and a senior scientist researching chronic pain management at the KITE Research Institute.
So how did a Toronto doctor end up producing 349 videos and counting and attracting fans from around the world? Her journey began in early 2019, when, having just turned 50, she started thinking about writing a book. A practicing physiatrist for more than 30 years, she specializes in diagnosing the various causes of physical pain and developing comprehensive, patient-centred treatment plans. Over the course of her long career, she had accrued a great deal of knowledge about the body’s pain system, and, while she was already sharing this knowledge through her various roles as an educator, scientist and physician, she felt she could do more.
When she told her son, who was 17 at the time, that she wanted to write a book about managing chronic pain so she could help more people, his response surprised her a little. “He said, ‘Mom, don’t write a book. Just open a YouTube channel,’” she recalls.
Initially, Dr. Furlan balked at the idea. She worried that if she became a YouTuber, she might be associated with the unaccredited, less-than-noble content creators out there who claim they can cure chronic pain with dubious products or techniques. She also wondered what her medical colleagues would think.
But she could see an immediate upside, too. “In my clinic, there’s never enough time to teach my patients what I want them to know,” she says. “I realized if I made videos of what I wanted to teach my patients, they could go home and watch me giving the extra education that I wanted to give them in the clinic, and they’d be calmer, less tired and able to [retain] more.”
So, she went for it. Using just the camera on her cellphone, Dr. Furlan started to record the various exercises and pain-management lessons she wanted to give her clinic patients, from hands-on demonstrations for relieving conditions like sciatica discomfort or lower back pain in pregnancy to straightforward lectures around such topics as increasing pain tolerance, activating the brain’s inner pharmacy and even gardening with chronic pain. She posted her first video in February 2019 and committed to posting something new on a monthly (and later, weekly) basis.
At first, she kept her YouTube channel relatively secret, not even telling her close friends and extended family about her efforts because she was still nervous about being called a YouTuber. It was mostly her patients who were privy to the videos, which she’d prescribe to them whenever the need presented itself.
“I’d say to a patient at my clinic, ‘OK, I’ve made a video I want you to watch – it’s just me at home, talking and doing these exercises. I think it will help you,’” she says.
But after about a year, the viewership of one video in particular, Exercises for Osteoporosis, began to grow. And once that video took off – it now has 4 million views – others followed.
“After that, the channel just exploded, and I couldn’t hide anymore,” she says.
To date, Dr. Furlan’s videos have amassed nearly 50 million cumulative views, with her most watched clip, Exercises for Shoulder Pain, reaching 8.4 million views. People around the world – patients and healthcare practitioners alike – have watched and benefited from her advice.
Keeping it simple
Among Dr. Furlan’s grateful followers is Claire Sara of Adelaide, Australia, who, in 2020, at the age of 34, was diagnosed with adhesive capsulitis, or frozen shoulder.
“I remember thinking the whole situation was absurd,” says Sara. “I was going to these specialists that were costing me hundreds of dollars every week to try and fix my shoulder, and it wasn’t getting much better.”
Wanting to take more initiative in her healing journey, Sara searched “exercises for shoulder pain” on YouTube and quickly ended up on Dr. Furlan’s channel, where she found a wealth of information on managing, treating and living with frozen shoulder.
“I followed Dr. Furlan’s shoulder-focused videos and started doing the exercises and learning about why I was in pain,” says Sara. “Up until then, no one could really explain to me what was happening in my body. But her videos did. And in such a simple, easy-to-understand way.”
Creating that sense of simplicity is vitally important to Dr. Furlan.
“Every time I record a video, I imagine I’m talking to one of my patients, so I speak in a way I know they can understand,” she explains, adding that she avoids jargon, spells out complicated medical terminology and includes closed captioning – in 56 languages – in each video. She believes it’s this accessibility, along with her authoritative understanding of the different types of chronic pain and how to deal with them, that resonates with viewers and keeps them coming back.
That was certainly the case for Sara, who watched some of Dr. Furlan’s videos every day for weeks on end and practiced the suggested exercises daily.
“I’m absolutely certain those videos sped up my healing process,” she says, adding that, while the pain and stiffness in her shoulder do come back on occasion, “knowing there’s this content that I can always refer back to is really empowering.”
A trusted source
It’s not just chronic pain sufferers who feel empowered by the information they find on Dr. Furlan’s channel. Physicians, physiotherapists and other healthcare practitioners around the world have added her videos to their treatment toolbox.
Muteesasira Edward, a physiotherapist based in Kampala, Uganda, regularly uses the videos to educate both himself and his patients. “I work in a low-resource setting, and these videos have reinforced my love of taking a holistic approach to managing chronic pain. They’ve helped me tailor exercise programs to meet each of my patients’ individual needs,” he says.
Closer to home, Dr. Furlan’s own colleagues – the ones she initially hid her YouTuber status from – are among her biggest fans. “I have friends and colleagues who tell me they prescribe my videos to their patients on a regular basis,” she says.
While Dr. Furlan has no plans of slowing her channel down, her dreams of being an author finally came true in the spring of 2023 when she published 8 Steps to Conquering Chronic Pain. The book takes much of the content from her YouTube channel and organizes it into a succinct and helpful guide to managing chronic pain. “Whether it’s videos or books, my colleagues and patients see me as a source they can trust, and that’s very rewarding.”
This Is KITE is a storytelling series that aims to excite and inspire audiences as well showcase the Institute’s people, discoveries and impressive range of research. The campaign will feature monthly stories and videos that chronicle key projects under KITE’s three pillars of research: Prevention, Restoration of Function, and Independent Living/Community Integration.