A few dozen of Victoria’s medical professionals crowded into the ballroom at the Victoria Country Club, dressed in their Bollywood finest. Victoria physicians featured in video honoring immigrants in health care A still from the parody music video “One Sikh,” featuring Victoria physician Dr. Manju Sachdev-Chandna with Dr. Zubin Damania. A few dozen of Victoria’s medical professionals crowded into the ballroom at the Victoria Country Club, dressed in their Bollywood finest. The occasion? A feature role in a parody music video that’s gained more than 250,000 views since it was posted online Tuesday night. Victoria physicians left their stethoscopes behind to sing and dance in the latest video from Dr. Zubin Damania, an internal medicine physician-turned-entertainer. Damania, who’s better known by his internet moniker, ZDoggMD, has developed a dedicated online following thanks to his parody videos that satirize and draw attention to numerous aspects of the U.S. health care system. His latest video is “One Sikh,” a parody of “One Week,” by the Barenaked Ladies. It pays tribute to first- and second-generation immigrant physicians and particularly the diaspora of South Asian health care workers who work in the U.S. The video was shot over a January weekend in Victoria and features multiple members of the city’s medical community, plus spelling bee champ Mandeep Jain and his parents. Dr. Manju Sachdev-Chandna, the medical director of Driscoll Children’s Quick Care clinic, choreographed all of the dancing in the video using her training as a classic Bollywood dancer. Sachdev-Chandna and Damania met by chance; Victoria physicians Drs. Cesar and Chris Velasco recommended they work together. Sachdev-Chandna, who has lived and worked in Victoria for more than 20 years, said Victoria was the perfect place for Damania to shoot the video. “The good thing about places like Victoria is they have embraced these foreign medical graduates and given them so much recognition for their hard work,” she said. Damania and his crew came to Victoria in January, shooting at the country club and in a local doctor’s office. Sachdev-Chandna, who is also an assistant professor of clinical medicine at Texas A&M University’s family medicine resident program at DeTar, enlisted resident physicians from DeTar Healthcare System to participate as well and spent a week training them in the choreography before filming. The video also features Sachdev-Chandna’s husband, Dr. Harish Chandna, and both of their daughters. The end result, Sachdev-Chandna said, is a great tribute to international physicians in the U.S. health care system. “He felt that these physicians need to be recognized for all their hard work, commitment and sacrifices that they have made in coming from almost nothing to this country and working so hard to make it for their families and the community,” Sachdev-Chandna said. About 30 percent of U.S. physicians are foreign-born, according to a U.S. Census Bureau analysis. And many of those physicians, Damania noted, are more likely to work in rural communities. “They’re serving our communities in rural and often disadvantaged areas where U.S. graduates often won’t go,” said Damania, whose father moved to the U.S. from India to work as a physician. “By celebrating and poking fun at ourselves, it’s a tribute to them but also a way to laugh at ourselves and also point out, ‘Hey, we’re contributing a lot to this country.’” The response to the video has been overwhelmingly enthusiastic, with both the original clip and the behind-the-scenes footage gaining thousands of views and reactions online. The Barenaked Ladies themselves even saw the video, tweeting at Damania to congratulate the crew on the feat. “I did not expect it to receive that much widespread positivity,” Sachdev-Chandna said. “This video was truly a tribute to international medical graduates for their hard work and also to celebrate their cultural uniqueness and diversity.” Source
