Abstract: Can You Trust What You Watch? - an Assessment of the Quality of Information about Aesthetic Surgery Available on YouTube

INTRODUCTION: The internet has become the primary source for patients seeking information on aesthetic surgery. YouTube, with billions of views daily, is a popular website for this purpose. Videos can be posted without regulation or standardization, which has the potential to lead to misinformation. Currently, there are no objective assessments of the quality of information on YouTube about aesthetic surgery, which the authors aim to address with this study. METHODS: The 12 most common aesthetic surgical procedures were identified from the 2015 ASPS procedural statistics and used as individual search terms in YouTube. Based on upward trends buttock lift was also included. The top 25 most relevant results for each search term between May 25th – June 8th, 2016 were identified and scored by 3 independent reviewers using a modified Ensuring Quality Information for Patients (EQIP) criteria. Average score, view count, and duration were compared amongst authorship groups (physician, patient or other entity). RESULTS: A total of 523 videos were graded using the modified EQIP criteria after duplicates were excluded. The mean modified EQIP score for all videos was 13.1 (SE = .18) out of a possible 26. The videos found under the search “nose reshaping” had the lowest mean score (10.24 SE = .74) while “eyelid surgery” and “buttock lift” had the highest (14.36 SE = .83, 14.36 SE = .70). Videos with physician authorship, (59% of included videos), were found to have a higher mean EQIP score and video views than those posted by patients.. Whether the search term used was the appropriate medical terminology for the procedure or a non-expert description, such as “otoplasty” versus “ear surgery,” influenced how many of the top 50 videos were relevant to plastic surgery and the average EQIP score for that search. CONCLUSION: The information available to patients from YouTube videos related to common aesthetic surgical procedures is of low quality. Patients should be aware that the information in existing videos has the potential to be inaccurate. Plastic surgeons and organizations such as the ASPS should be encouraged to develop high quality videos to educate patients effectively.