In today’s world, where we’re constantly overwhelmed by online content, I try to stand out in three key ways:

1. Quality over quantity. I place a strong emphasis on ensuring the information I share is accurate, trustworthy, and of the highest quality. That’s why I’m very hands-on with the entire process—from writing the scripts to editing and publishing the videos. The only part I outsource is the voiceover, mainly because I’m not a fan of my own European accent. I’m not a large company focused on profit. My main goal is to make a meaningful impact, and I believe my subscribers recognize and appreciate that.

2. Short and engaging videos. I skip lengthy intros and get straight to the point. I aim to make my content visually dynamic by including animations or introducing a new visual or keyword every 8–10 seconds. This helps keep viewers engaged throughout the video.

3. Leveraging radiology to introduce nuclear medicine. Radiology, the “brother” of nuclear medicine, is much more widely known. That’s why I occasionally create videos on radiology topics and use them to guide viewers toward nuclear medicine content. According to my analytics, around 40% of viewers who watch my nuclear medicine videos first discovered my channel through a radiology video.

When I was teaching nuclear medicine to medical students, my first intention was to have them discover that all the knowledge they had acquired since the first year of university made sense when it came to understanding what the images produced in nuclear medicine provided in terms of information about patients and their illnesses. Seeing them look at the images and gradually understand all the information they contained, provided they drew on all the knowledge they had acquired, was very gratifying. To attract them to the speciality, all we had to do was tell them that their whole activity would be driven by the same discovery if they went into nuclear medicine. Of course, we also had to reassure them that in this speciality they would be in close contact with patients, that it wasn’t just a question of looking at images on a screen, and that interacting with patients was essential to providing the most refined interpretation of the results obtained. I also reminded them that the important therapeutic aspect of nuclear medicine, which is growing all the time, would keep them in a relationship with patients that is that of a doctor who treats.

A first reason that is identified is the fact that nuclear medicine belongs to the nuclear field. As mentioned in the introduction to this article, nuclear energy has in people’s mind a bright side and a dark side that are inseparable: nuclear energy has been domesticated in nuclear plants, but atomic bombing and nuclear disasters unfortunately occurred.

Nuclear medicine is obviously on the bright side of the coin, but it remains indissociable from the risks inherent to civil and military exploitation of nuclear energy. Even the worst, over the last ten-fifteen years, the shiny side of nuclear energy has started to fade. The environmental movements have gained a large audience in the populations, particularly in the youth, and these movements have targeted the use of nuclear energy as a major risk for humanity, exemplified and symbolised by the Fukushima disaster. The political influence of these movements has been steadily increasing until the recent boost given by the current climate crisis. Even if this crisis is independent of the nuclear question, the ultimate risks inherent to nuclear energy remain associated with the global ecological preoccupations. This may certainly influence the choice of medical students who have chosen to dedicate their life to human welfare and are therefore sensitive to all questions related to the living conditions on earth. 

It is rarely recognised that this factor participates to the decision of students fascinated by the advances in nuclear medicine but who still opt for another speciality. 

This effect is enhanced by various indirect factors that I have identified as a teacher at the medical school. Students are strongly influenced by campaigns calling for a reduction in the use of ionising radiation in medicine because of its deleterious effects on health. These campaigns keep medical students away from nuclear medicine because they instil two questions in their mind. Should I dedicate my career to a harmful way of practising medicine? Should I adopt a speciality that will be subjected to the risk of being banned or being limited in its applications? In the same line, students have compulsory courses on radioprotection during their medical education. They know to what extent regulation of ionising radiation use is getting increasingly stringent, asking for the replacement of methods using ionising radiation by non-irradiating methods. Advances in ultrasound, magnetic resonance and optical imaging are systematically presented as announcing non-irradiating alternatives to functional and molecular imaging by PET and SPECT. Students therefore wonder: should I go for an activity that is destined to be replaced by others?

Also, I have realised that the opinions of medical students are influenced by events that may occur during their medical education. The periods of shortage in radioisotopes, happening from time to time, are viewed by them as revealing a risk for the future of nuclear medicine. They probably consider that these episodes of shortage are globally linked to a disinvestment in the nuclear industry and this, again, takes them away from the speciality.