Figs Scrubs Offends Women & DOs, But Here’s A Deeper Truth

What’s up guys? Today, I woke up to the outrage du jour, which happened to be this marketing clip from a company called Figs. They make high end bougie scrubs for the discerning scrubber. Let’s watch this real quick.

♪ Do you believe in life after scrubs, ♪ ♪ after scrubs, after scrubs, after scrubs? ♪ Well, this company should, because I don’t think they’re gonna sell any more scrubs to their target audience. Which is women, doctors, nurses, whether they’re DOs, NPs, MDs, DICs, or PIMPs. I mean, you guys see what’s wrong with that right? So first of all, they portray a female person holding a book upside down that says medical terminology. I wish I had that book in medical school, for dummies no less.

And then they zoom in on the badge which just says DO. Which for those who don’t know, is a doctor of osteopathy. So it is a physician. It’s a different path of training, but you end up still becoming a physician. You end up taking board exams. You end up doing a residency. You end up becoming colleagues altogether with medical allopathic trained medical doctors.

So that the reason this was met with such outrage, so Twitter immediately blew up with the usual, oh my gosh, this is insulting to women, check. Insulting to osteopathic physicians, double check. And I am never buying Figs again, and then it escalated from there. Now, let’s examine this a little bit. Is it insulting to women? Well, yeah, duh. Because it portrays a female, who’s kind of a ditz holding a book upside down that she shouldn’t be reading because medical terminology is in fact called four years of medical training.

Whether you’re an osteopath or an allopath, it doesn’t make a difference. And the second insult was the osteopathic piece. Well, why, I mean, just imagine sitting in on this marketing meeting. It’s usually like kids just out of college with severe vocal fry. And that’s both men and women, who speak in “up-talk,” again, both men and women, not trying to stereotype here, except for stereotyping marketers, who are the worst in these small companies. Let’s be really honest. I’ve had to deal with them, right? When we used to do a lot of sponsorships with, by the way, soul sucking. And we actually reached out to Figs early on and were like “Hey, could you send us some of your scrubs, “and we’ll sport ’em in a music video, “and all you gotta do is give us some scrubs, “and it’ll be a fun collaboration.” Never got a response, never got a response. ‘Cause they were so big, right? But deep inside, I was like one day the karma’s gonna turn and I will destroy you.

And now’s my chance, but I don’t really wanna destroy them. I wanna talk about a bigger problem, which is these marketers, right? They’re dumb as rocks. And again, I’m coming from a place of love. They’re dumb as rocks. Their whole purpose in life is to show in the interminable number of meetings that they sit through, their value. Which means in one of these meetings, somebody was like, “You know who we haven’t reached? “Um, we haven’t reached DOs, “so maybe we should put DO on the badge. “And of course our main audience is women.” By the way this is a guy that’s speaking. And we should, a straight guy. “We should um, you know, make it a woman. “And what do we know about medicine? “Well, there’s a lot of words. “So maybe we’ll make it ‘Medical Terminology for Dummies’. “And you know what’d be funny? “‘Cause humor sells. “Why don’t we put the book upside down?”

I have talked to these people. I have had to sit on phone calls with these people trying to be nice because I’m trying to get their business, never again. Now I just tell people “No, I don’t wanna do that. “No, your marketers are dumb. “No, if I have to sit with them, I’m gonna kill myself.” This is how the business world works. So let’s take Figs and just say, okay, they’re idiots. Like whoever they hired for marketing needs to just be fired. They apologized on Twitter, I can’t tell if it’s sincere or not, I don’t care. No one’s gonna accept their apology because it’s Twitter, and no apology will ever be enough for the outrage.

So here’s the thing, if you don’t like what they did, and I don’t, don’t buy their damn scrubs. Vote with your pocket book. But here’s what people do instead. They immediately realize, well I can score a ton of social points being outraged on social media, which means I can do a hash- If I’m a guy, I can do a hashtag. #heforshe, which somehow proves that I’m not a sexist because I’m for she. First of all, what a condescending. He for she, like what does that even mean? It means that you think you are so important that bestowing your support on the weaker opposite sex that desperately needs it, is a gift that you’re bestowing, and you’re such a good person, and you’re gonna signal your virtue on Twitter. Anytime I see that I’m like unfollow, delete, forget it.

Because listen, it isn’t about scoring social points for feminism or whatever it is you believe in. It’s about living what you believe in the real world. And believe me this, if you think Twitter, what you say on Twitter matters, a piece of, iota of, quanta of string in a string theory, the answer is no. All it does is make you feel like you’ve done something moral. That you’ve expressed your moral outrage. And it’s BS. Don’t do that. Live your life from the values you purport and project through your Tweets. That’s what you need to do.

Which means if you were a marketer in that group, you would never make such a God awful commercial, right? Live your life that way. Now the second thing is now what you see across Twitter as well is a lot of osteopaths standing up and saying, this is so offensive, this is terrible. And that’s true. But of course we know, and this came up on Twitter, that DO stands for Defensive Osteopath. I’m ready to get canceled myself. Why do I say that? And people were saying this on Twitter, but they were saying it meanly. I’m saying it out of love. Why do I say that?

Because the stigma that has existed against osteopathic physicians goes back decades. It’s real. MDs, medical doctors, allopaths have had a long history of stigmatizing their brothers and sisters who are osteopaths saying they don’t get the same training. They’re all woo woo. They do this manipulation thing, this osteopathic manipulation thing that’s not evidence based. They have lower MCATs and lower grades, and so they can’t be as smart as us. And you know they tend to do things like primary care, which means they’re weak and they work in rural areas, which means they’re weak.

And what does the defensive osteopath think? Well, maybe I am weaker than these guys. Even though my patients love me, I have these amazing outcomes, I went into this with all the right reasons which is a calling, it’s a calling for me. And I trained, I studied my butt off just like the MDs with pretty much the same curriculum, had to go through the same hoops and learn osteopathic manipulation, which can keep patients off narcotics, and involves touch, and an intuition of the physical structure of the body, which MDs mostly lack. Some of the best doctors I’ve ever had the joy and privilege to work with and call my colleagues are osteopathic physicians. I have spoken for osteopathic physician organizations in internal medicine and surgery. And after those talks, they would come up to me and I would feel a kind of connection and love that I would rarely experience in the MD circles because the MDs are so tightened down, and egoconstricted by comparison. And again, this isn’t a one’s better than the other, I’m just saying each of them is to be celebrated in their own way. And the stigma has gotta go away.

Now this commercial goes a long way at least to having us have the conversation. You know what else does? Trump’s physician is an osteopath. And I don’t know anything about him, I don’t know whether he’s a good doc or a bad doc. I don’t know if he’s politically motivated, I don’t care. What I care about is how the press has taken a crap on osteopathic physicians as a result, in a way that’s so brutally dumb, inaccurate, and so indicative of how biased the mainstream media is. If Trump, if it has anything to do with Trump, just throw the facts, and any reason, and any discourse out the door and just start attacking. And just whatever collateral damage happens along the way, go ahead and do it. And there you go.

And so my osteopathic colleagues have been asking me to speak out about this, and I felt it wasn’t really quite right until this thing came out. And now I have a lot to talk about. And this is the thing. My colleagues in the osteopathic space, like Doctor Mike has made great videos about this, wonderful human being, amazing doctor, amazing communicator. One of my favorite people by the way, if you don’t follow him go follow him, on YouTube or Instagram, anywhere you find him, he’s way bigger than we are, right? And deservedly so. Because he is a wonderful human being and a great communicator, he’s done videos about this. He doesn’t need the high and mighty MD to come to the defense of the osteopathic colleagues. We’re colleagues. This is the problem.

All this virtue signaling like MDs, there’s nothing wrong with osteopaths. Well just even saying that furthers the stigma, we shouldn’t even have to say that. And at this time in our history, it’s a pandemic. Everybody’s taking a crap on us. We don’t have PPE. Who’s the real enemy, huh? The structures of medicine that have turned us into commodities. Why aren’t we teaming up together? Doctors, nurses, and here’s the thing. So female physicians have been very outraged by this, super outraged. You’re gonna hear authentic crap from me right now and I’m gonna get canceled, and I don’t care.

So here’s the thing. Female physicians have been very outraged, and understandably so. This thing is garbage. It portrays them terribly. They are paid less than male physicians. There’s been a stigma forever. There’s data that shows they may have better outcomes than male physicians. Many of my mentors were female physicians. I’m married to a female physician. My mother is a female physician, all right. I don’t need to go around saying how much I support female physicians because it’s just part of the DNA. But here’s the thing, they’re outraged that this company is, first of all, belittling females, and second of all, belittling osteopaths. But what do many, many, many, too many female physicians in my opinion also do? They belittle female nurse practitioners, female PAs, female nurses. And they’ll actually attack me for defending those groups, saying, oh, I’m all for nurse practitioner, independent practice. Which by the way, I’ve never said, ever said that. I said we should all practice at the top of our training and license. And they’ll do that in the same breath as being outraged over a effing commercial.

As if we don’t have enough going on, let’s just all work together. Now of course, there is so much inequity you guys. And to say that there isn’t, you’re just simply being, you’re either blind, or you’re dishonest. And there’s implicit bias, which is difficult. I know I have it. I know I have it too. And I’ve put it out there on the table. So you guys know, okay, okay, if he’s behaving like a jackass, you can say, hey, that’s your implicit bias. Fine, I totally will hear that criticism. But, until we actually understand that if we’re gonna have change in the world, we have to turn that spotlight of outrage, inwards, look inside, see what it is we actually feel, believe, and are biased against, and work on that.

And then that will project out in the world, and the world will become better. It’s already happening. It’s already happening slowly. But that should be our focus, not outward expressions of outrage. And this is my editorial, this is my opinion. I think this particular ad really highlights what we ought to be focusing on. Not a dingdong company like Figs that makes apparel.

By the way, first of all, who the hell buys scrubs? Just be a good old fashioned red blooded American and steal them from the hospital like I did, and continue to do. All my scrubs say do not remove from hospital. Now of course, nowadays with COVID it’s a little dicey, but that’s what bleach is for.

So anyways guys, I hope you’re outraged, slightly inspired. I hope you’re turning inwards and seeing who it is you are, and what you wanna be in the world. And going and living that story. I don’t care if you’re a man, a woman, a DO, an MD, a PA, a naturopath. That’s another subject, we’ll talk about that. There’s some beautiful, lovely, naturopaths out there that I gotta give shout outs to.

And then there are some that are, we gotta have a talk. All right, I’m just being real people. I love you. ♪ Do you believe in life after scrubs, after scrubs, ♪ ♪ after scrubs, after scrubs? ♪ ♪ I can feel something inside me say ♪ ♪ I’m never gonna buy no Figs, no way, ohh ♪