Evaluation of the Reliability and Quality of Information in Carpal Tunnel Syndrome Shared on YouTube

Purpose Most of the internet users search online on YouTube for their health problems and the treatments. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the quality and the reliability of the videos on YouTube for Carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS). Methods The search was made by typing the keywords "Carpal tunnel syndrome" and/or "CTS" into the YouTube search engine, the first 50 videos on the first three pages of YouTube were evaluated. Of these videos, title, duration, number of views, days since uploaded, view ratio (view per day), number of likes, number of dislikes, video power index (VPI), video source, and video content data were recorded. The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) benchmark criteria were used to evaluate the reliability of videos, where the Global Quality Score (GQS) and Carpal tunnel syndrome-specific score (CTS-SS) were used to evaluate the quality of the videos. Results The mean duration of the videos was 364.12 seconds (min 57, max 1,638) and the total duration of videos was 18,206 seconds. The mean number of views was 140,916.1 (min 10,543, max 1,271,040) and total number of views was 7,045,804. The mean JAMA score was 1.8 (min 1, max 4), the mean GQS was 2.72 (min 1, max 5), and the mean CTS-SS was 4.74 (min 1, max 14). There was no significant effect of video content on VPI, JAMA, GQS, or CTS-SS (p >0.05). The JAMA, GQS, CT-SS scores of the videos from physicians and academic sources were significantly higher compared with other sources (p <0.05). Conclusion YouTube is one of the most frequently used resource for patients to get information about their diagnosis and treatment methods and it consists of videos with low reliability and quality for CTS. We believe that the creation of an internet-based information resource, which the patients can refer to is one of the current social responsibilities of the physicians and the academicians.