 time for Make My GMA Day, where we're showcasing someone special. So take a look at these videos taking over the internet of Tony Atkins, known as the Dancing Doc. Healthcare worker in Southern California is helping the youngest patients with his moves outside of the OR. ABC News reporter Tom Yamas introduces us to the Dancing Doc. Dancing healthcare workers putting smiles on the faces of children. Well, they say laughter is the best medicine, and one medical assistant from California He's a pediatric neurosurgery physician's assistant named Tony Atkins. Give it up for the Dancing Doc, Tony Atkins! I'm having fun here dancing y'all, and if you are not ready to have fun, then you've come to the wrong place, because that's what we're going to be talking about today. We're going to be talking to Tony Atkins, you guys. So this is another True Life series. If you haven't already done so, let's take a pause. Go ahead right now, subscribe to my channel, and follow me on Instagram at onthepa. Now that we've gotten that out of the way, I am going to be introducing you guys to Tony Atkins. Some of you may know him as the Dancing Doc, but what many of you may not know is that he's actually a PA. Yes, it's amazing, and it's amazing because I'm a physician assistant that is able to do all these things. Normally, it's just a doctor that does these things, but as a physician assistant, I'm able to do so much with my kids working with the team of doctors and nurses, and it's amazing, and all the nurses in the hospital love it. What?! I'm excited about that! I think that is so dope because it goes to show that PAs are doing some really great things out there. If you have not heard about this guy, he is a neurosurgery PA, and he's out in California doing it big with those... He's a pediatric neurosurgery PA, so he's there with the kids, you know, really sick kids, and you have to have, like, a big heart and kind of like a strong mind as well to do that. I mean, you have to be really smart because it's neurosurgery, right? So, I'm excited to introduce you guys to him. Without further ado, please, you guys, here is Tony Adkins. Let's hear what he has to... Hi, my name is Tony Adkins. I'm a physician assistant, also known as the Dancing Doc, and this is my true life. So, I became a physician assistant when, back in October of 2012, I went to University of Washington physician assistant school. I was there for about two years, grew up here in South Los Angeles, and then came back to Los Angeles after my completion of my school and started doing orthopedic spine surgery. So, the reason why I chose, became a physician assistant, it was, you know, it kind of fell on me because I was originally going to school to try to go into medical school, but then after kind of, like, thinking about it, I was getting a little bit older. So, and I felt that, you know, becoming a physician assistant was getting me where I wanted to be. I was able to change my jobs whenever I want to, get going to different professions and do different things at the same time. So, that's the reason why I chose physician assistant. So, always, once I was a little kid, you know, a lot of little kids, they always say, I want to be a doctor. I want to be a doctor for kids. So, you know, since I was a little kid, I always thought, you know, I want to be somebody that's going to take care of kids. When I got older and I would, wanted to go into medical school, I decided I wanted to become a pediatrician. So, once I got into PA school, I still wanted to work with kids. I did my undergrad in Neuroscience, University Riverside. So, always, I was interested about the nervous system. So, once I got out of PA school, I really wanted to be either in neurology or neurosurgery. So, that's when I sought out, after I completed orthopedic spying surgery, the job came available across the street at the Children's Hospital in Orange County to work in pediatric neurosurgery. So, how you get physically mentally and spiritually into getting to working with kids is, you know, in the beginning, it was tough because you see a lot of kids that don't make it. You see a lot of bad things that happen to the kids. So, it's, you know, you have to have a balance between having time to yourself as far as family life or whatever you like to do as well as, you know, working out. So, I work out a lot and I love music. So, those are things that kind of take me away from all the things that I see throughout the days, throughout the weeks. Because you see a lot of unfortunate things with kids that kind of transpires and we get some of the worst cases in Orange County area because we're a trauma center. So, we take care of a lot of these kids. So, the history of how the Dancing Doctor stuff kind of started was, you know, I had one patient that had childhood leukemia and then after he beat childhood leukemia, he was left with a lot of different things that kind of affected him as far as headaches and he had something called chiare malformation, a lot of different things. I kind of approached it as, you know, working with him because he was like depressed. So, since he was depressed, I kind of, one day I went to him and we tried, I tried to do something kind of live in him up. First I started playing music and then I started acting kind of silly and then one day I started dancing for him and then he got up to start dancing. So, then his mom recorded it and once she recorded it kind of just went on from there because she put it on social media and then from then on I felt that since I got him to break his cycle of depression, then I'm going to use it for all my kids if they would like to dance with me or do anything kind of still feeling pretty much silly all the time working with the kids and the parents love it as well because they see that I connect with them on a different level. So, once it kind of went viral, it was, I think it was one, it was in my feelings challenge. One of my patients challenged me and said, you know, can you do this? And I told him, of course. So, I did it within 30 minutes and within that day I got like 100,000 views and within the first week it was at 2 million views and I was blown away and from that point it started going so, it started rapping, you know, going everywhere. You know, people from other countries are commenting on me. My video, my Facebook page went from probably like 900 followers to over 5,000 and once you get 5,000 on Facebook, it kind of cuts off you accepting or doing anything to gain any more friends. So, they kept you at 5,000. Instagram went from probably, I would say, about 600 followers to about 10,000 within a week. So, it kind of just took off so fast, so quick and, you know, positive reception of it all. I love it, you know, it's been amazing. So, you know, it's okay to receive the positive attention, but at the end of the day, the whole premise of me doing the things that I do is to basically make my patients and families to feel comfortable because you come into the hospital, it already has a bad connotation and then you come in to see a neurosurgery, so it's like, whoa, what's it really going on? So, you know, the way I receive it, it's great. I love it. But, you know, at the end of the day, it's about how I treat my patients. This is what I do, you know, daily, all the time. So, I love the positive response. It's great. I love it. You know, it's amazing, you know, it's amazing how one person can affect the people's perception on different things. And, you know, medicine already has, you know, it already has a lot of negative things on it because it's like a distance of patient and provider. So, I'm trying to shorten that little gap because a lot of patients don't think that providers have fun, but we do. We have fun all the time and a lot of things don't get recorded. A lot of things don't be put on social media. It's just, for me, somehow it kind of got to social media and then now people are seeing, wow, this really happens. It does. It happens everywhere. So, there is some negative things that kind of come about just on social media. People are saying things like, this is the reason why, you know, we have to wait two hours. So, sometimes these trolls, you know, to me, it doesn't really bother me at all. You know, I kind of let those things kind of go to the side and don't worry about it. So, you know, everybody has their views. I'm not affected by it because I guess I've grown to have tough skin. I was in the military for a bit and then... So, I'm used to negative things. Being African-American, you get negative things. So, I don't care about it. It's fine with me. So, what I want to personally come out of this attention is other healthcare providers to kind of think outside the box when they're taking care of their patients. Either that being, you know, dancing or singing or just like goofing off with their patients. Just a different way to connect with their patients. Because we can give medicine and treat different things, but we need to think about the full patient, them as a whole, as well as their family that are involved. The most difficult part of my job is taking care of kids that are newly diagnosed, tumors that have been chugging along with a bunch of different red flags. And then, we see them in the ER because they have different things going on. We get an image and it's a really bad tumor that less than a year of life expectancy, as well as kids that have non-accidental trauma that are hurt due to family member or someone close to the family. Those are pretty tough as well. The most rewarding part of my job is being able to take care of kids and being able to interact with the families, laughing and crying with the families and making the kids smile and seeing the patients as well as their family. Once they go home and then I see them like at Disneyland or somewhere out in public and they're thanking me for the excellent care that I gave them and it just takes my breath away that they took the time to approach me and it's so rewarding in that instance. My final message and inspiration, the inspiration that I have every day when I go to work is this one little tagline that I put on the end of my email and it's by Irma Bumbeck and it basically says, when I stand before God at the end of my life I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left and could say I used everything you gave me. And with that, it rings home every day. Every day I walk into the hospital, I think of this and know that I'm going to do my very best that day and I'm going to take care of everybody the same way regardless of who you are. And that's the end of my life story. Thank you. Right, so I just want to say thank you so much to Mr. Atkins. Thank you so much, Tony Ford. Just taking the time out to do this True Life series. You know, I'm sure people got a lot from it and just got to kind of see what it's like to not only be in the limelight I guess you could say or that path to virality but also just what you deal with on a daily basis when working with these kids and I learned something. It's not necessarily that I learned something, but I'm taking something away from this which is talking about where you were like every day do your best and at the end of this all when God sees you you want to be able to say like I've used all of the talent that you've given to me and I think that's something that some of us don't do on a daily basis. I know I don't always do that. I'm not always giving everything my all. Sometimes I want to be a little lazy and be mediocre but we're called to do better. We're called to be better than that and so I'm really excited about that. You know, you reminded me of something and I really want to take that and hone that as I go throughout the rest of these clinical rotations and then the rest of my career as a PA. So thank you so much for that. You guys please go right now hit up all of Tony's different social media handles. I will leave a link for them but go hit them up, follow this guy support him because he's doing big things for the PA profession as well as for all of his patients and the families that he's just encouraging on a daily basis. So thank you again Mr. Atkins. Thank you so much for sharing your story. If you haven't seen any of my other True Life series please go again hit up my search bar. You can see that there. Follow me on Instagram at about at the PA and leave your comments in the comment section below if there's something that you want to see in another True Life or if there are comments or questions that you have for Mr. Atkins or you know you want to talk to him on, I don't know, Instagram. Go ahead and leave that in the comment section below and you know try to get those comments to him. Thank you guys so much for watching. I mean let's like, let's give a tribute to the Dancing Dog and like get this thing going and head out of here with some dancing, right? Let's get a little music. My DJ. Alright thank you guys so much for watching. I'll talk to you guys next time. Bye. Alright. Just free flowing. See how stiff I am? It can be. We can deal with that. I think. You people are sick. Keep trying, Cal. Okay. Maybe not. We'll leave that to an ad break. Just dance.