Quality Assessment of YouTube Videos as a Source of Information on Ingrown Toenails.

BACKGROUND

YouTube is one of the most widely used Internet sources, and many patients watch YouTube videos for gathering more information, especially about health problems. This study aimed to investigate the informative capabilities of YouTube videos about ingrown toenails. We hypothesize that most of the shared information is of low quality independent of source and that the attraction effect of videos is unrelated to quality.

METHODS

The first 50 videos in the English language using the keyword query ingrown toenail in YouTube search were analyzed. Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) benchmark criteria were used to assess video reliability, and Global Quality Score (GQS) and toenail specific score (TSS) were used to assess the quality of educational content.

RESULTS

The first 50 videos had 71,842,230 views (median, 333,585). Forty-one videos (82%) were from health-care professionals, seven (14%) were educational videos, and two (4%) were personal videos. The median JAMA score was 2, with the highest scores coming from academic sources. When grouped by view count (>300,000 versus ≤300,000) and like count (>10,000 versus ≤10,000), there was no significant difference in JAMA and GQS scores. The median GQS and toenail specific score were 3.0 and 5.5, respectively. Video duration was a significant predictor of GQS as a result of regression analysis (P = .002; β = 0.425).

CONCLUSIONS

Illustrated by the high number of views, ingrown toenail is a popular health topic on YouTube. Although popular and with content mostly uploaded by health-care professionals, content quality was found to be poor and videos to be unreliable and insufficient for informing patients because most videos seem to be geared toward entertainment rather than direct patient education. Health-care professionals should be aware of the generally low-quality data available.