Bored Panda reached out to Kelvin Fiagbe, the creator of these medical videos that are going viral on TikTok, to find out more about him. Kelvin is a 2nd year physician assistantship student in Ghana.
“I joined TikTok in May 2020. I started with comedy and found out that it wasn't really for me,” he recounted. “So I switched to medical content since I'm already in the medical field. I make medicine-related videos, from rare conditions to how people see, to guessing the name of the medical equipment.”
Kelvin said he’s been interested in medicine for as long as he remembers. “I used to have a first aid kit at home and usually play with it. But I realized that in medicine, I can actually help so many people and that makes me happy.”
When asked what rare medical condition fascinates him the most, Kelvin said it’s mirror-touch synesthesia. “Imagine feeling what other people feel just by seeing them, but there are many more.” Turns out, he learns these interesting facts from the medical shows that he likes so much as well as studying them in class.
The TikTok creator also said that he’s really glad to be able to “give people value and educate them every day.”
According to the Centers For Disease Control And Prevention, more than 4.2 million Americans aged 40 years and older are either legally blind or have low vision. The leading causes of blindness and low vision in the US are primarily age-related eye diseases. These include macular degeneration, cataract, diabetic retinopathy, and glaucoma, amblyopia and strabismus.
Refractive errors are the most common vision impairment in the US that makes it hard for a person to see clearly. It’s estimated that there are more than 150 million Americans with the condition. Reflective errors happen when the shape of your eye keeps light from focusing correctly on your retina (a light-sensitive layer of tissue in the back of your eye).
Other common eyesight conditions include cataract, which is a clouding of the eye’s lens and is the leading cause of blindness worldwide, and the leading cause of vision loss in the US. They can occur at any age and in some cases can be present since birth.
Diabetic retinopathy (DR), which you’ve seen in the video, is the condition that results from a common complication of diabetes. It progressively damages the blood vessels of the retina, the light-sensitive tissue at the back of the eye that is necessary for good vision. DR usually affects both eyes.
Glaucoma is another common group of diseases characterized by damage to the eye’s optic nerve, which occurs when the normal fluid pressure inside the eyes slowly rises. However, recent findings now show that glaucoma can occur with normal eye pressure. It can lead to severe vision loss and blindness.
