YouTube as a source of patient information for carpal tunnel syndrome
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LETTER TO THE EDITOR
YouTube as a source of patient information for carpal tunnel syndrome Aleksandar Radonjic 1,2,3
&
Emily Louise Evans 2 & Claudia Malic 1,2,4
Received: 28 October 2019 / Accepted: 2 January 2020 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Dear Editor, Patients are increasingly referring to the Internet for information regarding hand pathology. Recently, Kortlever et al. evaluated popular online websites addressing carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS) and found that they lacked substantially in both quality and readability [1]. Attention to these results is warranted given that CTS affects up to 10% of the general adult population. YouTube, a popular video-sharing platform, is the second most visited website in the world. Over 4 billion videos on YouTube are watched daily, many of which are designed to educate patients on specific diseases. However, YouTube is not peer-reviewed and thus patients who use it as an educational health resource are at risk of believing inaccurate information. Given that patients with CTS often lack adequate health literacy for treatment options of their disease [2], many may turn to YouTube for information regarding their diagnosis. We thus aimed to objectively define the reliability and comprehensiveness of these videos.
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s00238-020-01621-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Aleksandar Radonjic [email protected] Emily Louise Evans [email protected] Claudia Malic [email protected] 1
Division of Plastic Surgery, University of Ottawa, 501 Smyth Road, Ottawa, Ontario K1H 8L6, Canada
2
Faculty of Medicine, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada
3
The Ottawa Hospital – Civic Campus, 1053 Carling Avenue, Ottawa, Ontario K1Y 4E9, Canada
4
Paediatric Plastic Surgeon, Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario, Ottawa, Canada
While using a cleared cache web browser, YouTube (https:// www.youtube.com) was searched on August 23, 2019 for “carpal tunnel syndrome.” We used the default search setting of “relevance,” which is automatically implemented for all users unless manually changed, to reproduce an average search attempt. Only the first 50 videos were reviewed, as users are unlikely to access results past this point [3]. All videos were analyzed by two independent reviewers. Duplicates, nonEnglish videos, surgical procedure videos, and those not related to patient education for CTS were excluded. Video reliability was determined using both the Journal of the American Medical Association Score (JAMAS) and the modified DISCERN score (Supplementary online material; Appendix S1, S2). For each video, four and five points awarded in JAMAS and modified DISCERN reflect maximum reliability scores, respectively. Video comprehensiveness was evaluated using a checklist we deemed the Carpal Tunnel Syndrome Score (CTSS), generated by literature review and expert opinion (Supplementary online material; Appendix S3). One point was award
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