Physician Becomes Community Leader During Pandemic

Emily B. Landrum, MD / Starkville

As a young physician in the first 5 years of my practice, I was trying to get in my groove before the COVID pandemic started. I was getting really close! In medical school I felt like we learned pandemics were a thing of the past, so living through one was the last thing I imagined I would do. Even the “small pandemics” I have seen like SARS, MERS, swine flu and Ebola have been either short lived, contained or didn’t really have a significant impact on the U.S. Even my father who I practice side by side with each day never thought he’d see a pandemic of this magnitude in his practice. I suspect my grandfather may have been less surprised, but even he was born 10 years after the Spanish Flu Pandemic of 1918.

When I say I never thought I would live through a pandemic, I should also say I never thought I would live through a political pandemic where misinformation was almost as bad as the disease itself, and I certainly never thought I would become someone who shares medical advice on social media. Alas, here we are, a full year later and I typically post a live Facebook video each week trying to educate my community. At first I was just scrambling to update our clinic’s website and post updates with the most basic “facts.” The more things began to unfold in those first few weeks, the more I felt a responsibility to respond to the mistruths that were being promulgated so widely. MSMA reached out to a group of physicians to have a grassroots effort at doing just this. On March 20, 2020, I posted my first quick video trying to reassure patients to stay calm and stay home. That video got 1,600 views and 43 shares and since then, I’ve posted about 50 videos and have a public figure professional page entitled Emily Landrum, M.D. with 525 followers. I kept wondering when my videos wouldn’t be needed, but I don’t think that day is coming for a while. I’ve started to incorporate other helpful advice to give people a bit of a reprieve from COVID but always include some encouragement to continue to be safe.

A unique aspect about my pandemic experience has been the opposition to mask mandates. As the pandemic surged over the summer, we had growing evidence that masks were helping curb the numbers, but there were many antimask fallacies and opinions that crept into my community. I was frustrated. I felt defeated after so many months of seeing people suffer, I couldn’t understand why a mask was such a big deal, so I took my concerns to my city government. I wrote a letter to our Mayor and Board of Alderman strongly urging them to maintain a mask mandate for the safety of our citizens. To my surprise I was met with a letter signed by a number of other physicians in my community opposing the mandate. I spoke at the meeting and thankfully the mandate passed. Patients, friends and colleagues reached out to me thanking me for sharing helpful information and standing up for our community.

I tried to keep the momentum for masks going by partnering with Hi Y’all!, a local business, to make “Wear a Mask Y’all!” t-shirts. We used the profits from these shirts to raise over $1,200 for the Mississippi State Department Health.

In addition to my Facebook presence I’ve done several news interviews and newspaper articles. All of this has ultimately helped me find the groove in my practice I never thought I would have. I have made connections in my community, and I think the patients who follow me feel like they can talk to me more openly. They can view me as a trusted source of information and know that I’m going to do my best to tell them what they need to know in a way they can understand.

It’s been a wild year and I don’t know where my future will be in the social media world, but for now it’s a place where I can reach more members of my community than jut those who come into my exam room. If it helps just one person feel more at ease about their health and wellbeing, then it’s worth it.