On this episode of Telehealth Heroes, licensed clinical psychologist Dr. Marie Fang talks about embracing a private therapy practice, creating youtube videos to solve her own problems, and the journey to discover herself as both a therapist and content creator.
Episode Transcript
Dr. Marie Fang wasn’t always excited by the idea of running her own private practice. When she was first starting out, beginning a private practice meant she would only be helping people who could afford to pay cash or who had private insurance. Working in a clinic would have allowed her to give care to the people she felt needed it most: those underserved, without a lot of other resources. However, she discovered the value of helping others in a private practice setting. People with means still need help too.
Dr. Fang ran into a lot of roadblocks when trying to start her own private practice. One of the biggest challenges was that there weren’t a lot of existing resources to reference for beginning a private practice. In most medical education nationwide, the emphasis is placed on learning how to provide care. Very few curriculum ever bother to teach about starting and running a practice. Most private practitioners must act as entrepreneurs in that way, learning the ropes of business through trial and error.
From her own struggles and solutions, Dr. Fang created the YouTube channel and business, Private Practice Skills. She figured out how to face the challenges of private practice, and created resources to help others do the same thing—without all the hardships. However, starting a YouTube channel was nothing new for Dr. Fang.
“There’s a theme in my life that when I need something, I make a YouTube Channel on the topic. I don’t know why that became a theme, but it did.”
However, the Private Practice Skills YouTube channel was her first channel to really take off, and she said that most of her success came from being genuine and trying to solve her own problems. She picked topics by discovering which questions she had about running a private practice. “I sat down one day and wrote down about 50 questions I had and wanted to answer. Then, if I did one video a week, that was an entire year’s worth of content.”
But isn’t this podcast supposed to be about telehealth? Well, like many providers, Dr. Fang began using telehealth at the start of the pandemic. In fact, the first day she used doxy.me, she created a YouTube video of her experience figuring it out and setting it up. That video now has nearly 80,000 views, and is one of the top-performing videos on the subject of using doxy.me. Notably, it has outperformed many of doxy.me’s own videos on the subject. Not bad. But, out of the telehealth options available, why did she choose doxy.me? For the sake of her patients. “One thing that was important to me… I wanted something that my clients could just, here’s a waiting room link, it’s HIPAA secure, click the button you’re in. Because I need it now, like, yesterday.”
