17 ms·

Doctors are turning to YouTube to fill in gaps in their training

188 points by prostoalex 7y ago

wso 7y ago
Please don't
mrtweetyhack 7y ago
Reassuring news
mc32 7y ago
I just hope the “courseware” isn’t random videos with unsubstantiated claims. That is to say I’d hope what they are watching is current and medically accepted information. The article does claim that most of the ones accessed by profs are produced by professionals in their field —apparently in an effort to market their skills and help other professionals... But one would hope there is some vetting going on.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- DiabloD3 7y ago
  I just hope their actual accredited courses they took in college isn't just random videos with unsubstantiated claims. Sadly, that isn't always the case; given how much Doctors pay to graduate, you'd think everyone coming out of college would be highly educated, and that isn't true at all.
  - Scoundreller 7y ago
    A lot of health care education and training is clinical placements. It’s great for learning techniques, but it also means the right answer is the preceptor’s desired answer. Which isn’t much different than random videos. In other words, old bad habits don’t die, they get reinforced. Book-learning has its advantages, but it isn’t as fun.
- omegaworks 7y ago
  most information medical doctors get in their training about nutrition is generally unsubstantiated
  - thaumasiotes 7y ago
    Sure, but it's official unsubstantiated information. ;D
  - mywittyname 7y ago
    Nutrition science is hard. It has long timelines and relies largely on self-reporting and meta-analysis because it's unethical to study humans like we would mice and perform actual control studies. That's not even getting into the monetary and political factors involved. It took decades for society to agree that smoking was bad for your health, because of all the money paid to bribe scientists, doctors, and politicians. And this was obvious. The food industry is orders of magnitude larger in monetary terms, and involves far more people, many with political influence worldwide. I give doctors a pass on this.
    - thaumasiotes 7y ago
      It would make sense to give them a pass on not knowing correct nutritional information if they admitted they didn't know correct nutritional information. The situation that actually obtains is that they're passing off incorrect information as correct. That shouldn't be excused by the fact that knowing correct information is difficult.
      - PeterisP 7y ago
        It's absolutely justified to pass off the information that according to our best current knowledge is the approprate recommendation as of now - the fact that knowing the underlying correct information is difficult, and noone knows for certain if it's entirely correct or there are more nuances to be found doesn't mean that we should just shrug and act as if we have no information whatsoever. We do have some data that allows us to make useful decisions that are more likely than not to be correct. As long as that's the best we have, we should use that information.
wilgertvelinga 7y ago
A more curated and probably high quality alternative for surgeons and others in the operating room: https://incision.care https://incision.care
- THJr 7y ago
  They could always head over to https://medicalsciences.stackexchange.com/ https://medicalsciences.stackexchange.com/ Then again, they might wind up posting a question about a compound fracture only for it to be closed as a duplicate with a link to something about an impacted molar.
jonwachob91 7y ago
10+ years ago if you weren't familiar with the procedure you were performing, you'd just read a medical journal article about that procedure ( one that had been vetted by a peer-review process ). 10 years from now, will we see high level research from CERN being published to YT before it goes to Nature (or some other journal)?
- toomuchtodo 7y ago
  Scihub for papers and a Peertube instance with some sort of review and verification workflow would be formidable tooling for domain experts needing reference material. I am not a medical practitioner. How easy is it to obtain non-copyright encumbered videos of procedures for hosting and dissemination?
- mtgx 7y ago
  Yeah, I don't think we want CERN research being automatically deleted from YouTube because of some "copyright" machine buzzing sound in the background.
- viraptor 7y ago
  10+ years ago you'd have to spend considerable time and money getting to the journal article if you even could do that and it was available in your language. Then, you'd still have dry description, not a video of an actual procedure. (I'm still showing people scihub because they just wouldn't access the papers otherwise)
  - Scoundreller 7y ago
    It’s usually okay if you work at a hospital with academic affiliations. Even if you aren’t, you do get access to the university’s library if you take some students. Usually.
- buboard 7y ago
  its already happening - lots of conference lectures on YT
viraptor 7y ago
It's not just medical residents. Doctors do refresh their knowledge from videos online. And they totally google for information. But I don't think it's what many people imagine when reading it. > How can doctors tell which videos are valid and which contain bogus information? They're doctors. They had years of training and know the basics of what they're booking up. It's closer to experienced developers looking up specific usage for some tool which they're familiar with otherwise, rather than learning from scratch. Sure, there's going to be some extreme bad cases, but those are bad doctors in general, the source of info is not relevant.
- dang 7y ago
  Ok, we've promoted residents to doctors in the title above.
  - JshWright 7y ago
    That's more of an "expansion" than a "promotion" (residents are a subset of doctors)
- ISL 7y ago
  I've not met a professional that doesn't make internet searches for information when necessary. I'm a professional physicist, and I search for specialty-specific information multiple times per day, every day.
  - alexis_fr 7y ago
    Are there websites like StackOverflow where you find pharmaceutical receipes for acetylcysteine?
    - arcticfox 7y ago
      I think the parent is a physicist, not a pharmacologist, but I'm curious about what exists in both physics and pharmacology so I hope people chime in on both.
jeffreyrogers 7y ago
I know a surgery resident who says it's common to google info during surgeries.
ratfaced-guy 7y ago
Is there a Stack Exchange site for medical professionals? If not, why not?
- arkades 7y ago
  1) Journals 2) Rounds and Grand Rounds 3) Curbsides / phone a friend 4) Websites are complicated by liability issues. They’re casual, but by their nature documented. It’s kind of the worst of both worlds.
- Yajirobe 7y ago
  https://medicalsciences.stackexchange.com/ https://medicalsciences.stackexchange.com/
  - amelius 7y ago
    Are only medical professionals posting questions here, or is this also a place where patients look for answers?
- commandlinefan 7y ago
  What's more frightening is that we may be 10 years away from doctor "boot camps".
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - scarejunba 7y ago
    Well, that's not necessarily frightening. We haven't established that no-healthcare is superior to healthcare from "obviously boot-camped doctor". It may open up access to healthcare to more people.
    - tehjoker 7y ago
      Terrifying. Instead of funding the healthcare system to make it cheap or free like every other developed country, lower the quality and suck more money out of the indigent.
arkades 7y ago
Jfc no one is learning surgery from a video. A resident looks up an article or a textbook chapter, watches a video, then assists - and when they’re assisting, they’re better prepared because all of the above. Then they watch a video to refresh. If the video is nonsense, they’ll know right quick. They’ll assist many times before they take lead, and will take lead with a supervisor many times before ever going solo. The headline makes it sound like someone is watching a YT video and then walking into the OR to perform an operation.
- dang 7y ago
  The headline sounds reasonably neutral and factual to me. If someone wants to suggest a better one, we can change it.
- starpilot 7y ago
  I didn't get that impression from the headline at all.
- notadoc 7y ago
  Not everything is taught in medical schools, which means there are gaps in knowledge. That can be problematic when a particular unique approach is more valid for a specific subset of patients. In those cases, the only way to learn how to perform those variational procedures might be by watching it online. Would the surgeon feel confident with that situation? That's another question entirely.
swiley 7y ago
I used to really dislike youtube because I thought there was nothing but people goofing off and ripped TV shows on it. Honestly people are doing serious research on it, and besides that you can get lectures or even just friendly monologues/QAs from experts on almost any subject. It was MIT's math videos that convinced me to start watching it, after that I found some of my favorite proffessor's lectures there too along with a lot of graduate level stuff from other universities. Then there where all the videos from amateur and professional scientists and musicians and so on. The basics of my personal understanding of music theory came from a nearly century old book I found in a used book store but it's grown a lot thanks to youtube. I hate that it's controlled by a single company, and that they keep tearing down the chemistry channels but while it's still no substitute for reading papers when you get into really niche subjects (ex: molecular dynamics and computational chemistry) the educational side of youtube is surprisingly underrated.
- spookthesunset 7y ago
  There is an amazing amount of fairly high quality content on youtube these days. For my personal use, it has given all the "traditional" media sources a serious run for their money. If it wasn't for my partner I could easily cancel cable, netflix, HBO, and everything else and just live off of youtube content. To me, the coolest part about youtube is it is "direct to consumer" with no middlemen. With few exceptions, all the content I watch comes directly from regular people making videos about things they are passionate about (be it mine exploration, building stuff with CNC mills, urban exploration, documenting abandoned malls, filming their day driving a train, picking locks, etc). There isn't some production company that sets guidelines or provides funding... it is just regular people. I do agree it is a problem that youtube is the only real player in town to host this sort of thing. Hopefully that will change over time.
- asdff 7y ago
  Unless you know what to look for, the discovery on youtube for these videos is terrible. I watched a lecture from my prof, 40 minute video with a couple hundred views uploaded by an official university youtube account. You'd expect the sidebar to be filled with similar 40 minute lectures uploaded from similar university accounts with similar low viewer counts, but instead the sidebar was filled with these zaney outlandish conspiracy theory videos. They probably got preference on the sidebar because they contained all the relevant keywords in their headings (not counting the obligatory "Hillary" or "Satan" or "Lizard person" found in most of these titles), coupled with millions of views. Sometimes I like to imagine a youtube where it's the university lecures that get millions of views, not the far right tinfoil hat content that eventually rears it's ugly head in every sidebar feed on the site.
caycep 7y ago
there isn't a "textbook" for a lot of these. AS a resident, we basically used a combo of pubmed, uptodateonline.com, and a lot of it was the time spent w/ older docs and gleaming bits and pieces of info from whichever patient happened to roll in or were scheduled that day. Haphazardly stochastic way of learning, but there it is....
bredren 7y ago
I'd be worried about a doctor that didn't use all online resources available to learn about the areas they practice in. Around 2010, I started noticing medical professionals had less information about what I had come in with than what I could find in my own research. Not every time, but part of the time I've felt like I did not get valuable information gleaned from obvious experience. Other times, I've found treatments I can handle on my own, saving copays and deductibles. For example, the procedure for draining blood from a fingernail after slamming it in a car door. More recently, I had ankle sprain that seemed to recur, and a medical visit for $65 came back with "go to PT." Which was going to be $125 per session. So I watched youtube videos and got therabands and have been doing the exercises for "free." And it is working. There is unquestionable space for medical professionals, their treatments and the gates they create between people and prescribed medicines. However, just as YC has turned expensive legal processes into simplified documents "anyone" can use online, some medical diagnosis / treatments have been similarly decomodified.
- mdorazio 7y ago
  I think there are a few things here. First, a lot of people go to the doctor for things that don't require a doctor at all. Your smashed fingernail is a perfect example - why would you even go to the doctor for that unless you really think your finger is fractured? Same with basic illnesses - waiting rooms are packed with people who have a basic cold and haven't even given it a week to resolve itself. This is really where telemedicine/remote doctors/whatever you want to call it should fill in the gap. On the other hand, your ankle sprain example is a good one to use for a reason why doctors can be really important for basic things like PT. A rather large percentage of people straight up will not follow a basic PT regimen (let alone a diet/exercise change) to resolve a problem unless 1) a doctor tells them to, and 2) they are instructed on exactly what to do at regular on-site sessions. Ortho offices are packed with people who just want an MRI and some injections rather than having to actually do some work over the course of a few months to get better. For people who are self-motivated and take care of their own health, doctors are rarely actually needed until you get to the point of needing specific tests and prescriptions. But for the other ~80ish percent of people, doctors are pretty much the only route to getting better.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
fedups 7y ago
Sometimes I google home maintenance videos for information on a project, and I need to spend a lot of time looking for a certain level of quality of the source since I'm a complete amateur. I'll often want to confirm by looking for multiple videos and making sure the sources converge on some basic points since I have so little background. But since I'm much more knowledgeable about certain programming or mathematical techniques, I can do much quicker searches to refresh my memory since my BS filter is going to go off pretty quickly, and I can verify the truth of a source based on a more extensive background. The fear mongering in this article requires you to assume that doctors are much more like amateur carpenters clicking on links at random rather than highly trained practitioners with years of education in their field.
barkingcat 7y ago
Who in this day and age and in a job that gives access to the internet doesn't use it for checking up on things for their job? Developers do it on a near constant basis. Computer techs do it, secretaries use this, lawyers use it constantly...
ssully 7y ago
I have a feeling this is common in nearly every field these days. While not equivalent to a medical procedure, I had some furnace issues last year. I was able to do a lot of repairs myself with a mix of reading forum posts and youtube videos. I ended up having to call a furnace tech for an issue that was outside my comfort area at the time, but I was still able to communicate my issue with him more intelligently because of the knowledge I learned from watching a few videos.
- Scoundreller 7y ago
  Or in my case, I’ve armed myself with enough knowledge to prove that the mechanics at the dealership are either incompetent or lobotomized flow-chart followers. Like, I already told you I swapped the coils and spark plugs around. The problem didn’t move, so they can’t be the problem!
nycbenf 7y ago
I recently finished cardiac rehab but when I was on the waiting list to start my PCP told me "Just google cardiac rehab, find some videos and do them." The videos I found were from the NHS. They were very different from what cardiac rehab in the US was like, but they got me up and moving.
sxg 7y ago
I'm a current medical resident, and I have absolutely used YouTube to fill in the gaps. Just a few days ago during lunch, I watched a 3 minute video on how to remove a PICC line before taking one out of a patient. I have taken PICC lines out before, but I just wanted a quick refresher before doing another one. I've also used YouTube to improve my physical exam skills. In the real world, you just don't get enough abnormal findings in certain areas to learn quickly. For example, although ACL tears are common, I haven't seen more than a few due to the context I work in. I use YouTube to see more examples of these kinds of abnormal findings. While I was in medical school, the vast majority of my education came from online resources, YouTube, question banks, or ancillary books that were not part of the official curriculum. If you go to any medical student in the US today, they'll be familiar with the four key resources: UWorld (massive bank of USMLE board questions), First Aid (reference text book containing key information for board exams), Pathoma (video series teaching histology and pathology created by a University of Chicago pathologist), and SketchyMedical (another video series of visual mnemonics to help you memorize microbiology and pharmacology facts). There are also community driven projects such as Zanki and Brosencephalon, which are Anki decks with 25,000+ cards containing info needed for board exams. Another popular YouTube channel is Armando Hasudungan, who illustrates medical concepts aimed towards med students. The med school I went to and many others are moving away from the traditional lecture-based model. Lectures at my school were offered, but they were optional and attendance was usually <25% of our class as the quality was notoriously poor. My med school classmates and I found learning much, much more effective with this hands off approach. This does call in to question the value and role of a medical school today. Now that I'm a resident working with other residents who went to med schools all across the US, I'm realizing that most of us just forced our way through the official curriculum and did most of our "real" learning using the same resources I mentioned above.
- _qhtn 7y ago
  How do you know these aren't bullshit videos? By your own admission, you lack familiarity in what you're looking up- so how do you know they aren't BS?
- JshWright 7y ago
  > I'm a current medical resident, and I have absolutely used YouTube to fill in the gaps. I pull up online sources pretty regularly in the back of an ambulance. Most often to look up the details of some more obscure medication or condition in the pt's medical history. Generally I try to do it out of eyeshot of the pt...
Mathnerd314 7y ago
> Medical experts say this content hasn't been particularly well curated, in part because it's an expensive process. There are lots of paid medical video sites, e.g. a quick search turns up https://www.madeformedical.com/ https://www.madeformedical.com/ and https://cine-med.com/ https://cine-med.com/. Presumably these are better curated than YouTube and may even go through some type of peer-review process.
- JackRabbitSlim 7y ago
  I'll bet every one of them (tries to) absolve themselves from liability through the use of their posted materials. An unverifiable promise that it's somehow a more reliable source than "DuceDangler73s" youtube video on performing a colonoscopy is no comfort.
codingslave 7y ago
Doctors are the most overrated profession of all time. Before any kind of diagnosis, medical procedure, or conversation about anything specific, I do a ton of research. I read the latest publications, the drug interactions, the human biology, etc. When I go in there and question the doctor, they usually dont know the half of what I bring up. They prescribe the same thing to the same set of symptoms basically every time, without much capacity to take in the nuances of some condition. These people need to lose their status in American society and be brought down to skepticism, half of the doctors in hospitals became doctors for the status. Computers cannot replace these people fast enough, I trust very few. If anything, I think that the recent trend of data driven medicine will expose the medical industry for what it is, most of these drugs and procedures have no positive effect on the patients. In a ton of cases, the outcomes and long term ramifications of different treatments are never recorded and analyzed on a wide scale. Very few drugs we have do anything at all but cover up the symptoms.
- DoreenMichele 7y ago
  Patients with a serious, chronic condition are frequently more knowledgeable about it than most doctors they deal with. Yet if a patient tries to talk about that online, you can count on some ugly beat down accusing them of being nutcase antivaxxers or similar slurs.
  - cc81 7y ago
    It is also difficult to assess because as someone with a chronic illness I also know that there a lot of people who think they are more knowledgeable than doctors while they in reality most likely are overestimating single studies or don't have the full picture.
    - DoreenMichele 7y ago
      It's possible to admit you have no idea if what they say makes sense without launching into ugly and dismissive attacks based on a presumption that they can't possibly know what they are talking about. But people rarely meet that standard and typically default to asserting that whatever is currently generally accepted must be correct. That's not at all how actual science works. Actual science admits "This is our best understanding currently. Feel free to improve upon it." Shouldn't we be well past the abusive treatment doled out to Galileo for daring to dissent? He was eventually determined to be correct, but it was well after his death, so it did nothing to remedy his troubles.
Vysero 7y ago
YouTube got me through engineering school. This is just how people learn now. Books have their place but in reality I think YouTube and videos in general are a much more versatile learning tool for students or anyone for that matter. Personally, I am glad doctors are taking advantage of this new and incredibly valuable resource.
wnmurphy 7y ago
When I see my doctor, there's an understanding between us. We both know that professionals like software engineers and doctors look up the answers constantly. I don't expect him to know everything, nor is that even possible. I do trust him to know how to find the right answer, and think structurally through a set of symptoms, and debug them.
vmchale 7y ago
They only mentioned VR for surgeons in passing, but such a development would be interesting.
- npo9 7y ago
  I think haptic feedback and novel controls are just as important as the VR. How much force does it take to [do critical part of open heart surgery]? What’s the exact hand motion for [neurosurgeon technique]? It would be great if a doctor got to practice the hand motions in as near to real life conditions as possible. I suspect insurance companies will insist surgeons keep up with vr/haptic training if it is found that it increases success rates of surgey.
  - asdff 7y ago
    That's what the cadaver is for in med school. Haptic feedback developers would have to rip open hundreds of human bodies at various places and measure the force and texture to get anything vaguely accurate. Not to mention that this would avoid all the rawness of surgery; the distinct smell of blood and shit, the warm pulsing body of the patient, oddly presented internals and what they mean, knowledge that nicking an artery could end a patients life in minutes. Maybe the better angle is figuring out how to get more cadavers in the hands of med students or docs for practice.
faissaloo 7y ago
What might it take to create medical hackspaces?
- buboard 7y ago
  medicine is about to undergo major transformations, not only because of new tools and ML, but there just aren't enough doctors for an aging planet hackspaces may work if automated diagnosis proves decent for most common ailments, and doctors will have to become a lot more specialized in difficult cases
- autoexec 7y ago
  For regular folks? There are online places where people talk about their issues, exchange information, even hack their medical devices, but the thin line between a community of interested parties helping each other out with their health concerns and practicing medicine without a license will make it risky for spaces set up to do more than very general education. The liability issues alone would make me hesitate.
  - faissaloo 7y ago
    Yeah, I wonder what it would take to get something like that going. It'd be risky for sure, but it's still interesting to consider.
take_a_breath 7y ago
Doctors are just like the rest of us!!
m0zg 7y ago
The good ol' "Google the Stack Overflow" method. Except when advice is bogus people die. I frankly held doctors (and especially the very generously paid US doctors) in much higher regard until I got older and had a chance to seriously interact with a few. As far as I can tell unless the situation is blindingly clear (in which case Googling the symptoms works about as well as a doctor), they're basically guessing, often badly. To give just one example: I was once suggested a shoulder surgery (with a 6+ mo recovery period) based on an extremely blurry MRI of my shoulder where I'm pretty sure the doctor couldn't really see anything. Because why the hell not take another $20K in revenue for his practice, right? Ironically the shoulder pain went away in about 4 months after I switched my sleeping position. I now basically avoid doctors other than for the yearly checkup or if there's something serious that Google can't fix (broken leg, or a prescription).
chris72205 7y ago
Perhaps they will call this curated content "YouTube Med"
sharadov 7y ago
I am pretty sure there are quacks in certain parts of the world who are seeing these videos and performing surgeries on people.
buboard 7y ago
just don't let big pharma find out!
williesleg 7y ago
I'm finding a lot of "do the needful" doctors these days like H1B programmers, they just do the needful in order to get you shuffled out of there.
dillonmckay 7y ago
Here is a Harvard Business Review podcast that discusses how new doctors train for robotic surgery. https://hbr.org/ideacast/2019/08/how-robots-and-ai-are-changing-job-training https://hbr.org/ideacast/2019/08/how-robots-and-ai-are-chang...
asimovfan 7y ago
Yes. This is what internet is for.
soared 7y ago
I have a friend in medical school who I asked about googling/etc, and he sent me a good article. Related and way less alarmist (quote from my link, not the article) > Enter the online world of medical references that your doctor uses instead of Google: UpToDate, DynaMed, Current, and many more. These are medically sound, evidence-based databases that tell doctors most things they need to know to be able to treat just about any patient according to the most up to date guidelines. http://www.linacolucci.com/2016/08/the-secret-google-used-by-doctors-and-unknown-to-patients/ http://www.linacolucci.com/2016/08/the-secret-google-used-by...
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  {Fry-meme:} Not sure if joking or not aware that link is dead. [it links to a dreamhost page with a bad SSL cert and no content.]
martyvis 7y ago
News at 11: Professionals (and everyone else) uses the internet to plug gaps in their knowledge. (We used to make do with books, journals,schools, guilds, coffee shops)
GordonS 7y ago
I've had GPs and consultants alike google all sorts of things (even opioid conversion charts)... I have to say, I don't like it! I know they can't know everything, but quite often it feels like it's something they should know, or at the very least have a trusted source/calculator bookmarked for.
strstr 7y ago
There's a pretty cool "journal" called JOMI [0], which is basically peer-reviewed videos of doctors performing common procedures. I actually watched one of the videos there to assuage my fear of a fairly routine arthroscopic procdure. I suspect this is the type of thing most doctors are interested in seeing people rely upon, rather than youtube. It's been vetted for quality. There are obviously downsides (getting procedures to appear on this is more complicated than just uploading a video to youtube), but it seems much harder to question the quality. [0] https://jomi.com/ https://jomi.com/
zelon88 7y ago
The problem that I see is not so much that the quality of videos on YouTube is lacking, it is that the quality of officially sanctioned videos is lacking. Or that the availability of officially sanctioned videos of high enough quality are not readily available to the masses. > ..."The researchers evaluated the content for their technical skill demonstrated and educational skill, and created a score. Only 16 of the videos even met basic criteria, including whether they were performed by a health-care professional or institution." As I understand it; professionals compared the techniques used to the techniques as they are taught in classrooms and textbooks and found that the techniques used in the video would not have resulted in a passing grade in a classroom environment. Assuming that is true then the root cause isn't low quality YT videos. That is a symptom of the problem that the learning materials provided in classroom environments are not providing enough educational value to students in the first place. I'm not in the medical field, but I've watched the struggle and politics of people fighting through medical school. It is grueling. If it's anything like tech then maybe 65% of it will apply in the real world and 15% you won't ever need to use in the first place. It's also going to be loaded with advanced technical jargon and put an incredible cognitive stress on students to teach otherwise simple, menial tasks while stressing statistics and verbatim policy while completely losing the spirit of those statistics and policies. So to fix the issue, researchers should be studying these YT videos to determine what makes them so informational and engaging. With car or computer repair videos people familiar with the subject matter will skip the non-essential information, focusing cognitive resources on the parts they need to clarify most. Students can focus on their own deficiencies without having to waste energy on arbitrary and irrelevant information.
booleandilemma 7y ago
Would you want a doctor that does not go to YouTube/Google for gaps in their training? Are you assuming they’ll have no gaps?
harry8 7y ago
Doctors are turning to medical journals to fill in gaps in their knowledge. Doctors are referring to textbooks to fill in gaps in their knowledge. Any doctor who isn't doing that possibly is in the wrong profession. Indeed most of what is learned in a medical degree is so the doctor can assess these sources and embrace or reject them. Doctors attend lectures at conferences. Always have. Now cheap video distribution exists. So now sometimes virtually attending the lecture on youtube that they otherwise would have not been able to see. Surgical techniques are often better demonstrated than described, so videoing them makes some sense. Watching videos of techniques that have the potential to be better than what you are using is a very good thing. Assessing and rejecting them if it turns out the technique isn't better is obviously what any competent human being would do. Quality control? Hell medical journals barely have that. Ask a statistician about medical journal quality control - it's only driving policy accross all of health care... You have to assess sources, evidence, outcomes etc. for literally anything that is new or you suspect might need revisiting. Any doctor who can't do that effectively should not be using that particular source or possibly should not be a doctor at all. The practioners of every single complex job have "gaps in their knowledge" - nobody knows everyting. Most if not all people faced with having to perform tasks where they don't have perfect knowledge are using resources to study. Online video is just one, very effective in certain cases, way of increasing knowledge. CNBC may not be a way of increasing knowledge based on this article and I assess a youtube video demonstrating the reading of this article is something I might reject as being useful.
- joatmon-snoo 7y ago
  And honestly, VHS tapes of recordings have been around forever: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0896401774 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0896401774
bartread 7y ago
I don't really see why this is surprising or horrifying: I turn to YouTube all the time to fill gaps in my knowledge, or watch talks/lectures (I've been enjoying Strangeloop recently, along with assorted DIY content). As for quality control, this is what our critical faculties are for. I have no data but suspect good critical thinking skills correlate well with being a good doctor, so I don't worry about these people picking up information from YouTube. Bringing this back to programming, others have mentioned StackOverflow. StackOverflow has descended into a cesspool of crowdsourced ignorance but nevertheless it's still possible for competent developers to find useful information there. On the flipside, if StackOverflow disappeared tomorrow, all the bad programmers finger-vomiting garbage "information" across every question would continue to be bad programmers.
bashwizard 7y ago
I had an anaphylactic shock a few years ago and started googling the symptoms (no, I didn't have cancer after all) and ended up realizing very quickly that I should probably go to the ER and get some antihistamine, so I did. The day after I booked a meeting with a doctor and while sitting there talking about my symptoms and reasons for getting the anaphylactic shock the doctor was on google and even the same web site I was looking at the day before. So I told him "I already know that because you're basically just reciting the very same web site I was looking at yesterday before going to the ER but I felt that I should see an actually doctor about it. So do you have any clue what could have caused the shock or should I just pay close attention to what I eat, drink etc just like it says on that web site and hope for the best that I find the food that I'm allergic to?" He had no clue. Thank god for free healthcare (oh well, tax paid universal healthcare) in Sweden.
- asdf333 7y ago
  I find one common misconception that programmers have is "everything in the world has a root cause that we can understand". In the programming world that's mostly true. So when a doctor or medical professional doesn't know the exact reason for something (e.g. why did I get x?) many start thinking the doctor is stupid/useless/incompetent. Well it turns out that medicine is still a very inexact science and there are many things that are not well understood.
  - stevenhuang 7y ago
    > everything in the world has a root cause that we can understand But that indeed is true of reality. The difference is in the likelihood of being able to find that root cause. I think any programmer can appreciate the difficulty of finding answers in a domain that proves elusive. Take the example of a spaghetti codebase. You know the answer is there somewhere, but you wouldn't fault someone for not being able to give you an answer. So I wouldn't be so certain. In fact I feel many would understand the difficulties and not disparage a doctor for being unable to give an exact diagnosis.
    - braindeath 7y ago
zby 7y ago
OK - a lot of answers here are about "doctors using online resources to fill up their knowledge gaps is totally normal" - which is a fine point. But the article is about a particular online resource not known for an a priori high standard. The more interesting question is "How can doctors tell which videos are valid and which contain bogus information?" - and it is actually a quote literally taken from the article. The situation is not very good: """ For instance, one recent study found more than 68,000 videos associated with a common procedure known as a distal radius fracture immobilization. The researchers evaluated the content for their technical skill demonstrated and educational skill, and created a score. Only 16 of the videos even met basic criteria, including whether they were performed by a health-care professional or institution. Among those, the scores were mixed. In several cases, the credentials of the person performing the procedure could not be identified at all. Even more concerning, studies are finding that the YouTube algorithm is highly ranking videos where the technique isn’t optimal. A group of researchers found that for a surgical technique called a laparoscopic cholecystectomy, about half the videos showed unsafe maneuvers. """ Online epistemology is more and more important and while our culture is trying to catch up it is still behind. There is lots and lots of important phenomena (for example https://www.gwern.net/Littlewood https://www.gwern.net/Littlewood). By the way patients are also using online resources and encounter similar problems: https://medium.com/@zby/rational-patient-community-6d3617dffcfe https://medium.com/@zby/rational-patient-community-6d3617dff...
chewz 7y ago
Good move. Patients are doing this for some years now.

188 points by prostoalex 7y ago

wso 7y ago

Please don't

mrtweetyhack 7y ago

Reassuring news

mc32 7y ago

I just hope the “courseware” isn’t random videos with unsubstantiated claims. That is to say I’d hope what they are watching is current and medically accepted information. The article does claim that most of the ones accessed by profs are produced by professionals in their field —apparently in an effort to market their skills and help other professionals... But one would hope there is some vetting going on.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
DiabloD3 7y ago
I just hope their actual accredited courses they took in college isn't just random videos with unsubstantiated claims. Sadly, that isn't always the case; given how much Doctors pay to graduate, you'd think everyone coming out of college would be highly educated, and that isn't true at all.
- Scoundreller 7y ago
  A lot of health care education and training is clinical placements. It’s great for learning techniques, but it also means the right answer is the preceptor’s desired answer. Which isn’t much different than random videos. In other words, old bad habits don’t die, they get reinforced. Book-learning has its advantages, but it isn’t as fun.
omegaworks 7y ago
most information medical doctors get in their training about nutrition is generally unsubstantiated
- thaumasiotes 7y ago
  Sure, but it's official unsubstantiated information. ;D
- mywittyname 7y ago
  Nutrition science is hard. It has long timelines and relies largely on self-reporting and meta-analysis because it's unethical to study humans like we would mice and perform actual control studies. That's not even getting into the monetary and political factors involved. It took decades for society to agree that smoking was bad for your health, because of all the money paid to bribe scientists, doctors, and politicians. And this was obvious. The food industry is orders of magnitude larger in monetary terms, and involves far more people, many with political influence worldwide. I give doctors a pass on this.
  - thaumasiotes 7y ago
    It would make sense to give them a pass on not knowing correct nutritional information if they admitted they didn't know correct nutritional information. The situation that actually obtains is that they're passing off incorrect information as correct. That shouldn't be excused by the fact that knowing correct information is difficult.
    - PeterisP 7y ago
      It's absolutely justified to pass off the information that according to our best current knowledge is the approprate recommendation as of now - the fact that knowing the underlying correct information is difficult, and noone knows for certain if it's entirely correct or there are more nuances to be found doesn't mean that we should just shrug and act as if we have no information whatsoever. We do have some data that allows us to make useful decisions that are more likely than not to be correct. As long as that's the best we have, we should use that information.

wilgertvelinga 7y ago

A more curated and probably high quality alternative for surgeons and others in the operating room: https://incision.care https://incision.care

THJr 7y ago
They could always head over to https://medicalsciences.stackexchange.com/ https://medicalsciences.stackexchange.com/ Then again, they might wind up posting a question about a compound fracture only for it to be closed as a duplicate with a link to something about an impacted molar.

jonwachob91 7y ago

10+ years ago if you weren't familiar with the procedure you were performing, you'd just read a medical journal article about that procedure ( one that had been vetted by a peer-review process ). 10 years from now, will we see high level research from CERN being published to YT before it goes to Nature (or some other journal)?

toomuchtodo 7y ago
Scihub for papers and a Peertube instance with some sort of review and verification workflow would be formidable tooling for domain experts needing reference material. I am not a medical practitioner. How easy is it to obtain non-copyright encumbered videos of procedures for hosting and dissemination?
mtgx 7y ago
Yeah, I don't think we want CERN research being automatically deleted from YouTube because of some "copyright" machine buzzing sound in the background.
viraptor 7y ago
10+ years ago you'd have to spend considerable time and money getting to the journal article if you even could do that and it was available in your language. Then, you'd still have dry description, not a video of an actual procedure. (I'm still showing people scihub because they just wouldn't access the papers otherwise)
- Scoundreller 7y ago
  It’s usually okay if you work at a hospital with academic affiliations. Even if you aren’t, you do get access to the university’s library if you take some students. Usually.
buboard 7y ago
its already happening - lots of conference lectures on YT

viraptor 7y ago

It's not just medical residents. Doctors do refresh their knowledge from videos online. And they totally google for information. But I don't think it's what many people imagine when reading it. > How can doctors tell which videos are valid and which contain bogus information? They're doctors. They had years of training and know the basics of what they're booking up. It's closer to experienced developers looking up specific usage for some tool which they're familiar with otherwise, rather than learning from scratch. Sure, there's going to be some extreme bad cases, but those are bad doctors in general, the source of info is not relevant.

dang 7y ago
Ok, we've promoted residents to doctors in the title above.
- JshWright 7y ago
  That's more of an "expansion" than a "promotion" (residents are a subset of doctors)
ISL 7y ago
I've not met a professional that doesn't make internet searches for information when necessary. I'm a professional physicist, and I search for specialty-specific information multiple times per day, every day.
- alexis_fr 7y ago
  Are there websites like StackOverflow where you find pharmaceutical receipes for acetylcysteine?
  - arcticfox 7y ago
    I think the parent is a physicist, not a pharmacologist, but I'm curious about what exists in both physics and pharmacology so I hope people chime in on both.

jeffreyrogers 7y ago

I know a surgery resident who says it's common to google info during surgeries.

ratfaced-guy 7y ago

Is there a Stack Exchange site for medical professionals? If not, why not?

arkades 7y ago
1) Journals 2) Rounds and Grand Rounds 3) Curbsides / phone a friend 4) Websites are complicated by liability issues. They’re casual, but by their nature documented. It’s kind of the worst of both worlds.
Yajirobe 7y ago
https://medicalsciences.stackexchange.com/ https://medicalsciences.stackexchange.com/
- amelius 7y ago
  Are only medical professionals posting questions here, or is this also a place where patients look for answers?
commandlinefan 7y ago
What's more frightening is that we may be 10 years away from doctor "boot camps".
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- scarejunba 7y ago
  Well, that's not necessarily frightening. We haven't established that no-healthcare is superior to healthcare from "obviously boot-camped doctor". It may open up access to healthcare to more people.
  - tehjoker 7y ago
    Terrifying. Instead of funding the healthcare system to make it cheap or free like every other developed country, lower the quality and suck more money out of the indigent.

arkades 7y ago

Jfc no one is learning surgery from a video. A resident looks up an article or a textbook chapter, watches a video, then assists - and when they’re assisting, they’re better prepared because all of the above. Then they watch a video to refresh. If the video is nonsense, they’ll know right quick. They’ll assist many times before they take lead, and will take lead with a supervisor many times before ever going solo. The headline makes it sound like someone is watching a YT video and then walking into the OR to perform an operation.

dang 7y ago
The headline sounds reasonably neutral and factual to me. If someone wants to suggest a better one, we can change it.
starpilot 7y ago
I didn't get that impression from the headline at all.
notadoc 7y ago
Not everything is taught in medical schools, which means there are gaps in knowledge. That can be problematic when a particular unique approach is more valid for a specific subset of patients. In those cases, the only way to learn how to perform those variational procedures might be by watching it online. Would the surgeon feel confident with that situation? That's another question entirely.

swiley 7y ago

I used to really dislike youtube because I thought there was nothing but people goofing off and ripped TV shows on it. Honestly people are doing serious research on it, and besides that you can get lectures or even just friendly monologues/QAs from experts on almost any subject. It was MIT's math videos that convinced me to start watching it, after that I found some of my favorite proffessor's lectures there too along with a lot of graduate level stuff from other universities. Then there where all the videos from amateur and professional scientists and musicians and so on. The basics of my personal understanding of music theory came from a nearly century old book I found in a used book store but it's grown a lot thanks to youtube. I hate that it's controlled by a single company, and that they keep tearing down the chemistry channels but while it's still no substitute for reading papers when you get into really niche subjects (ex: molecular dynamics and computational chemistry) the educational side of youtube is surprisingly underrated.

spookthesunset 7y ago
There is an amazing amount of fairly high quality content on youtube these days. For my personal use, it has given all the "traditional" media sources a serious run for their money. If it wasn't for my partner I could easily cancel cable, netflix, HBO, and everything else and just live off of youtube content. To me, the coolest part about youtube is it is "direct to consumer" with no middlemen. With few exceptions, all the content I watch comes directly from regular people making videos about things they are passionate about (be it mine exploration, building stuff with CNC mills, urban exploration, documenting abandoned malls, filming their day driving a train, picking locks, etc). There isn't some production company that sets guidelines or provides funding... it is just regular people. I do agree it is a problem that youtube is the only real player in town to host this sort of thing. Hopefully that will change over time.
asdff 7y ago
Unless you know what to look for, the discovery on youtube for these videos is terrible. I watched a lecture from my prof, 40 minute video with a couple hundred views uploaded by an official university youtube account. You'd expect the sidebar to be filled with similar 40 minute lectures uploaded from similar university accounts with similar low viewer counts, but instead the sidebar was filled with these zaney outlandish conspiracy theory videos. They probably got preference on the sidebar because they contained all the relevant keywords in their headings (not counting the obligatory "Hillary" or "Satan" or "Lizard person" found in most of these titles), coupled with millions of views. Sometimes I like to imagine a youtube where it's the university lecures that get millions of views, not the far right tinfoil hat content that eventually rears it's ugly head in every sidebar feed on the site.

caycep 7y ago

there isn't a "textbook" for a lot of these. AS a resident, we basically used a combo of pubmed, uptodateonline.com, and a lot of it was the time spent w/ older docs and gleaming bits and pieces of info from whichever patient happened to roll in or were scheduled that day. Haphazardly stochastic way of learning, but there it is....

bredren 7y ago

I'd be worried about a doctor that didn't use all online resources available to learn about the areas they practice in. Around 2010, I started noticing medical professionals had less information about what I had come in with than what I could find in my own research. Not every time, but part of the time I've felt like I did not get valuable information gleaned from obvious experience. Other times, I've found treatments I can handle on my own, saving copays and deductibles. For example, the procedure for draining blood from a fingernail after slamming it in a car door. More recently, I had ankle sprain that seemed to recur, and a medical visit for $65 came back with "go to PT." Which was going to be $125 per session. So I watched youtube videos and got therabands and have been doing the exercises for "free." And it is working. There is unquestionable space for medical professionals, their treatments and the gates they create between people and prescribed medicines. However, just as YC has turned expensive legal processes into simplified documents "anyone" can use online, some medical diagnosis / treatments have been similarly decomodified.

mdorazio 7y ago
I think there are a few things here. First, a lot of people go to the doctor for things that don't require a doctor at all. Your smashed fingernail is a perfect example - why would you even go to the doctor for that unless you really think your finger is fractured? Same with basic illnesses - waiting rooms are packed with people who have a basic cold and haven't even given it a week to resolve itself. This is really where telemedicine/remote doctors/whatever you want to call it should fill in the gap. On the other hand, your ankle sprain example is a good one to use for a reason why doctors can be really important for basic things like PT. A rather large percentage of people straight up will not follow a basic PT regimen (let alone a diet/exercise change) to resolve a problem unless 1) a doctor tells them to, and 2) they are instructed on exactly what to do at regular on-site sessions. Ortho offices are packed with people who just want an MRI and some injections rather than having to actually do some work over the course of a few months to get better. For people who are self-motivated and take care of their own health, doctors are rarely actually needed until you get to the point of needing specific tests and prescriptions. But for the other ~80ish percent of people, doctors are pretty much the only route to getting better.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

fedups 7y ago

Sometimes I google home maintenance videos for information on a project, and I need to spend a lot of time looking for a certain level of quality of the source since I'm a complete amateur. I'll often want to confirm by looking for multiple videos and making sure the sources converge on some basic points since I have so little background. But since I'm much more knowledgeable about certain programming or mathematical techniques, I can do much quicker searches to refresh my memory since my BS filter is going to go off pretty quickly, and I can verify the truth of a source based on a more extensive background. The fear mongering in this article requires you to assume that doctors are much more like amateur carpenters clicking on links at random rather than highly trained practitioners with years of education in their field.

barkingcat 7y ago

Who in this day and age and in a job that gives access to the internet doesn't use it for checking up on things for their job? Developers do it on a near constant basis. Computer techs do it, secretaries use this, lawyers use it constantly...

ssully 7y ago

I have a feeling this is common in nearly every field these days. While not equivalent to a medical procedure, I had some furnace issues last year. I was able to do a lot of repairs myself with a mix of reading forum posts and youtube videos. I ended up having to call a furnace tech for an issue that was outside my comfort area at the time, but I was still able to communicate my issue with him more intelligently because of the knowledge I learned from watching a few videos.

Scoundreller 7y ago
Or in my case, I’ve armed myself with enough knowledge to prove that the mechanics at the dealership are either incompetent or lobotomized flow-chart followers. Like, I already told you I swapped the coils and spark plugs around. The problem didn’t move, so they can’t be the problem!

nycbenf 7y ago

I recently finished cardiac rehab but when I was on the waiting list to start my PCP told me "Just google cardiac rehab, find some videos and do them." The videos I found were from the NHS. They were very different from what cardiac rehab in the US was like, but they got me up and moving.

sxg 7y ago

I'm a current medical resident, and I have absolutely used YouTube to fill in the gaps. Just a few days ago during lunch, I watched a 3 minute video on how to remove a PICC line before taking one out of a patient. I have taken PICC lines out before, but I just wanted a quick refresher before doing another one. I've also used YouTube to improve my physical exam skills. In the real world, you just don't get enough abnormal findings in certain areas to learn quickly. For example, although ACL tears are common, I haven't seen more than a few due to the context I work in. I use YouTube to see more examples of these kinds of abnormal findings. While I was in medical school, the vast majority of my education came from online resources, YouTube, question banks, or ancillary books that were not part of the official curriculum. If you go to any medical student in the US today, they'll be familiar with the four key resources: UWorld (massive bank of USMLE board questions), First Aid (reference text book containing key information for board exams), Pathoma (video series teaching histology and pathology created by a University of Chicago pathologist), and SketchyMedical (another video series of visual mnemonics to help you memorize microbiology and pharmacology facts). There are also community driven projects such as Zanki and Brosencephalon, which are Anki decks with 25,000+ cards containing info needed for board exams. Another popular YouTube channel is Armando Hasudungan, who illustrates medical concepts aimed towards med students. The med school I went to and many others are moving away from the traditional lecture-based model. Lectures at my school were offered, but they were optional and attendance was usually <25% of our class as the quality was notoriously poor. My med school classmates and I found learning much, much more effective with this hands off approach. This does call in to question the value and role of a medical school today. Now that I'm a resident working with other residents who went to med schools all across the US, I'm realizing that most of us just forced our way through the official curriculum and did most of our "real" learning using the same resources I mentioned above.

_qhtn 7y ago
How do you know these aren't bullshit videos? By your own admission, you lack familiarity in what you're looking up- so how do you know they aren't BS?
JshWright 7y ago
> I'm a current medical resident, and I have absolutely used YouTube to fill in the gaps. I pull up online sources pretty regularly in the back of an ambulance. Most often to look up the details of some more obscure medication or condition in the pt's medical history. Generally I try to do it out of eyeshot of the pt...

Mathnerd314 7y ago

> Medical experts say this content hasn't been particularly well curated, in part because it's an expensive process. There are lots of paid medical video sites, e.g. a quick search turns up https://www.madeformedical.com/ https://www.madeformedical.com/ and https://cine-med.com/ https://cine-med.com/. Presumably these are better curated than YouTube and may even go through some type of peer-review process.

JackRabbitSlim 7y ago
I'll bet every one of them (tries to) absolve themselves from liability through the use of their posted materials. An unverifiable promise that it's somehow a more reliable source than "DuceDangler73s" youtube video on performing a colonoscopy is no comfort.

codingslave 7y ago

Doctors are the most overrated profession of all time. Before any kind of diagnosis, medical procedure, or conversation about anything specific, I do a ton of research. I read the latest publications, the drug interactions, the human biology, etc. When I go in there and question the doctor, they usually dont know the half of what I bring up. They prescribe the same thing to the same set of symptoms basically every time, without much capacity to take in the nuances of some condition. These people need to lose their status in American society and be brought down to skepticism, half of the doctors in hospitals became doctors for the status. Computers cannot replace these people fast enough, I trust very few. If anything, I think that the recent trend of data driven medicine will expose the medical industry for what it is, most of these drugs and procedures have no positive effect on the patients. In a ton of cases, the outcomes and long term ramifications of different treatments are never recorded and analyzed on a wide scale. Very few drugs we have do anything at all but cover up the symptoms.

DoreenMichele 7y ago
Patients with a serious, chronic condition are frequently more knowledgeable about it than most doctors they deal with. Yet if a patient tries to talk about that online, you can count on some ugly beat down accusing them of being nutcase antivaxxers or similar slurs.
- cc81 7y ago
  It is also difficult to assess because as someone with a chronic illness I also know that there a lot of people who think they are more knowledgeable than doctors while they in reality most likely are overestimating single studies or don't have the full picture.
  - DoreenMichele 7y ago
    It's possible to admit you have no idea if what they say makes sense without launching into ugly and dismissive attacks based on a presumption that they can't possibly know what they are talking about. But people rarely meet that standard and typically default to asserting that whatever is currently generally accepted must be correct. That's not at all how actual science works. Actual science admits "This is our best understanding currently. Feel free to improve upon it." Shouldn't we be well past the abusive treatment doled out to Galileo for daring to dissent? He was eventually determined to be correct, but it was well after his death, so it did nothing to remedy his troubles.

Vysero 7y ago

YouTube got me through engineering school. This is just how people learn now. Books have their place but in reality I think YouTube and videos in general are a much more versatile learning tool for students or anyone for that matter. Personally, I am glad doctors are taking advantage of this new and incredibly valuable resource.

wnmurphy 7y ago

When I see my doctor, there's an understanding between us. We both know that professionals like software engineers and doctors look up the answers constantly. I don't expect him to know everything, nor is that even possible. I do trust him to know how to find the right answer, and think structurally through a set of symptoms, and debug them.

vmchale 7y ago

They only mentioned VR for surgeons in passing, but such a development would be interesting.

npo9 7y ago
I think haptic feedback and novel controls are just as important as the VR. How much force does it take to [do critical part of open heart surgery]? What’s the exact hand motion for [neurosurgeon technique]? It would be great if a doctor got to practice the hand motions in as near to real life conditions as possible. I suspect insurance companies will insist surgeons keep up with vr/haptic training if it is found that it increases success rates of surgey.
- asdff 7y ago
  That's what the cadaver is for in med school. Haptic feedback developers would have to rip open hundreds of human bodies at various places and measure the force and texture to get anything vaguely accurate. Not to mention that this would avoid all the rawness of surgery; the distinct smell of blood and shit, the warm pulsing body of the patient, oddly presented internals and what they mean, knowledge that nicking an artery could end a patients life in minutes. Maybe the better angle is figuring out how to get more cadavers in the hands of med students or docs for practice.

faissaloo 7y ago

What might it take to create medical hackspaces?

buboard 7y ago
medicine is about to undergo major transformations, not only because of new tools and ML, but there just aren't enough doctors for an aging planet hackspaces may work if automated diagnosis proves decent for most common ailments, and doctors will have to become a lot more specialized in difficult cases
autoexec 7y ago
For regular folks? There are online places where people talk about their issues, exchange information, even hack their medical devices, but the thin line between a community of interested parties helping each other out with their health concerns and practicing medicine without a license will make it risky for spaces set up to do more than very general education. The liability issues alone would make me hesitate.
- faissaloo 7y ago
  Yeah, I wonder what it would take to get something like that going. It'd be risky for sure, but it's still interesting to consider.

take_a_breath 7y ago

Doctors are just like the rest of us!!

m0zg 7y ago

The good ol' "Google the Stack Overflow" method. Except when advice is bogus people die. I frankly held doctors (and especially the very generously paid US doctors) in much higher regard until I got older and had a chance to seriously interact with a few. As far as I can tell unless the situation is blindingly clear (in which case Googling the symptoms works about as well as a doctor), they're basically guessing, often badly. To give just one example: I was once suggested a shoulder surgery (with a 6+ mo recovery period) based on an extremely blurry MRI of my shoulder where I'm pretty sure the doctor couldn't really see anything. Because why the hell not take another $20K in revenue for his practice, right? Ironically the shoulder pain went away in about 4 months after I switched my sleeping position. I now basically avoid doctors other than for the yearly checkup or if there's something serious that Google can't fix (broken leg, or a prescription).

chris72205 7y ago

Perhaps they will call this curated content "YouTube Med"

sharadov 7y ago

I am pretty sure there are quacks in certain parts of the world who are seeing these videos and performing surgeries on people.

buboard 7y ago

just don't let big pharma find out!

williesleg 7y ago

I'm finding a lot of "do the needful" doctors these days like H1B programmers, they just do the needful in order to get you shuffled out of there.

dillonmckay 7y ago

Here is a Harvard Business Review podcast that discusses how new doctors train for robotic surgery. https://hbr.org/ideacast/2019/08/how-robots-and-ai-are-changing-job-training https://hbr.org/ideacast/2019/08/how-robots-and-ai-are-chang...

asimovfan 7y ago

Yes. This is what internet is for.

soared 7y ago

I have a friend in medical school who I asked about googling/etc, and he sent me a good article. Related and way less alarmist (quote from my link, not the article) > Enter the online world of medical references that your doctor uses instead of Google: UpToDate, DynaMed, Current, and many more. These are medically sound, evidence-based databases that tell doctors most things they need to know to be able to treat just about any patient according to the most up to date guidelines. http://www.linacolucci.com/2016/08/the-secret-google-used-by-doctors-and-unknown-to-patients/ http://www.linacolucci.com/2016/08/the-secret-google-used-by...

pbhjpbhj 7y ago
{Fry-meme:} Not sure if joking or not aware that link is dead. [it links to a dreamhost page with a bad SSL cert and no content.]

martyvis 7y ago

News at 11: Professionals (and everyone else) uses the internet to plug gaps in their knowledge. (We used to make do with books, journals,schools, guilds, coffee shops)

GordonS 7y ago

I've had GPs and consultants alike google all sorts of things (even opioid conversion charts)... I have to say, I don't like it! I know they can't know everything, but quite often it feels like it's something they should know, or at the very least have a trusted source/calculator bookmarked for.

strstr 7y ago

There's a pretty cool "journal" called JOMI [0], which is basically peer-reviewed videos of doctors performing common procedures. I actually watched one of the videos there to assuage my fear of a fairly routine arthroscopic procdure. I suspect this is the type of thing most doctors are interested in seeing people rely upon, rather than youtube. It's been vetted for quality. There are obviously downsides (getting procedures to appear on this is more complicated than just uploading a video to youtube), but it seems much harder to question the quality. [0] https://jomi.com/ https://jomi.com/

zelon88 7y ago

The problem that I see is not so much that the quality of videos on YouTube is lacking, it is that the quality of officially sanctioned videos is lacking. Or that the availability of officially sanctioned videos of high enough quality are not readily available to the masses. > ..."The researchers evaluated the content for their technical skill demonstrated and educational skill, and created a score. Only 16 of the videos even met basic criteria, including whether they were performed by a health-care professional or institution." As I understand it; professionals compared the techniques used to the techniques as they are taught in classrooms and textbooks and found that the techniques used in the video would not have resulted in a passing grade in a classroom environment. Assuming that is true then the root cause isn't low quality YT videos. That is a symptom of the problem that the learning materials provided in classroom environments are not providing enough educational value to students in the first place. I'm not in the medical field, but I've watched the struggle and politics of people fighting through medical school. It is grueling. If it's anything like tech then maybe 65% of it will apply in the real world and 15% you won't ever need to use in the first place. It's also going to be loaded with advanced technical jargon and put an incredible cognitive stress on students to teach otherwise simple, menial tasks while stressing statistics and verbatim policy while completely losing the spirit of those statistics and policies. So to fix the issue, researchers should be studying these YT videos to determine what makes them so informational and engaging. With car or computer repair videos people familiar with the subject matter will skip the non-essential information, focusing cognitive resources on the parts they need to clarify most. Students can focus on their own deficiencies without having to waste energy on arbitrary and irrelevant information.

booleandilemma 7y ago

Would you want a doctor that does not go to YouTube/Google for gaps in their training? Are you assuming they’ll have no gaps?

harry8 7y ago

Doctors are turning to medical journals to fill in gaps in their knowledge. Doctors are referring to textbooks to fill in gaps in their knowledge. Any doctor who isn't doing that possibly is in the wrong profession. Indeed most of what is learned in a medical degree is so the doctor can assess these sources and embrace or reject them. Doctors attend lectures at conferences. Always have. Now cheap video distribution exists. So now sometimes virtually attending the lecture on youtube that they otherwise would have not been able to see. Surgical techniques are often better demonstrated than described, so videoing them makes some sense. Watching videos of techniques that have the potential to be better than what you are using is a very good thing. Assessing and rejecting them if it turns out the technique isn't better is obviously what any competent human being would do. Quality control? Hell medical journals barely have that. Ask a statistician about medical journal quality control - it's only driving policy accross all of health care... You have to assess sources, evidence, outcomes etc. for literally anything that is new or you suspect might need revisiting. Any doctor who can't do that effectively should not be using that particular source or possibly should not be a doctor at all. The practioners of every single complex job have "gaps in their knowledge" - nobody knows everyting. Most if not all people faced with having to perform tasks where they don't have perfect knowledge are using resources to study. Online video is just one, very effective in certain cases, way of increasing knowledge. CNBC may not be a way of increasing knowledge based on this article and I assess a youtube video demonstrating the reading of this article is something I might reject as being useful.

joatmon-snoo 7y ago
And honestly, VHS tapes of recordings have been around forever: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0896401774 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0896401774

bartread 7y ago

I don't really see why this is surprising or horrifying: I turn to YouTube all the time to fill gaps in my knowledge, or watch talks/lectures (I've been enjoying Strangeloop recently, along with assorted DIY content). As for quality control, this is what our critical faculties are for. I have no data but suspect good critical thinking skills correlate well with being a good doctor, so I don't worry about these people picking up information from YouTube. Bringing this back to programming, others have mentioned StackOverflow. StackOverflow has descended into a cesspool of crowdsourced ignorance but nevertheless it's still possible for competent developers to find useful information there. On the flipside, if StackOverflow disappeared tomorrow, all the bad programmers finger-vomiting garbage "information" across every question would continue to be bad programmers.

bashwizard 7y ago

I had an anaphylactic shock a few years ago and started googling the symptoms (no, I didn't have cancer after all) and ended up realizing very quickly that I should probably go to the ER and get some antihistamine, so I did. The day after I booked a meeting with a doctor and while sitting there talking about my symptoms and reasons for getting the anaphylactic shock the doctor was on google and even the same web site I was looking at the day before. So I told him "I already know that because you're basically just reciting the very same web site I was looking at yesterday before going to the ER but I felt that I should see an actually doctor about it. So do you have any clue what could have caused the shock or should I just pay close attention to what I eat, drink etc just like it says on that web site and hope for the best that I find the food that I'm allergic to?" He had no clue. Thank god for free healthcare (oh well, tax paid universal healthcare) in Sweden.

asdf333 7y ago
I find one common misconception that programmers have is "everything in the world has a root cause that we can understand". In the programming world that's mostly true. So when a doctor or medical professional doesn't know the exact reason for something (e.g. why did I get x?) many start thinking the doctor is stupid/useless/incompetent. Well it turns out that medicine is still a very inexact science and there are many things that are not well understood.
- stevenhuang 7y ago
  > everything in the world has a root cause that we can understand But that indeed is true of reality. The difference is in the likelihood of being able to find that root cause. I think any programmer can appreciate the difficulty of finding answers in a domain that proves elusive. Take the example of a spaghetti codebase. You know the answer is there somewhere, but you wouldn't fault someone for not being able to give you an answer. So I wouldn't be so certain. In fact I feel many would understand the difficulties and not disparage a doctor for being unable to give an exact diagnosis.
  - braindeath 7y ago

zby 7y ago

OK - a lot of answers here are about "doctors using online resources to fill up their knowledge gaps is totally normal" - which is a fine point. But the article is about a particular online resource not known for an a priori high standard. The more interesting question is "How can doctors tell which videos are valid and which contain bogus information?" - and it is actually a quote literally taken from the article. The situation is not very good: """ For instance, one recent study found more than 68,000 videos associated with a common procedure known as a distal radius fracture immobilization. The researchers evaluated the content for their technical skill demonstrated and educational skill, and created a score. Only 16 of the videos even met basic criteria, including whether they were performed by a health-care professional or institution. Among those, the scores were mixed. In several cases, the credentials of the person performing the procedure could not be identified at all. Even more concerning, studies are finding that the YouTube algorithm is highly ranking videos where the technique isn’t optimal. A group of researchers found that for a surgical technique called a laparoscopic cholecystectomy, about half the videos showed unsafe maneuvers. """ Online epistemology is more and more important and while our culture is trying to catch up it is still behind. There is lots and lots of important phenomena (for example https://www.gwern.net/Littlewood https://www.gwern.net/Littlewood). By the way patients are also using online resources and encounter similar problems: https://medium.com/@zby/rational-patient-community-6d3617dffcfe https://medium.com/@zby/rational-patient-community-6d3617dff...

chewz 7y ago

Good move. Patients are doing this for some years now.