If you’re struggling to find ways to get a good night’s sleep, you may not want to use YouTube videos as a resource. Researchers found what they described as an alarming amount of medical misinformation in YouTube videos about sleep disorders. “What’s tricky is that so much of health information is very nuanced, and a lot of popular YouTube videos have clickbait and appeal to shorter attention spans,” said lead study author Rebecca Robbins.
She is an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School and investigator in the division of sleep and circadian disorders at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, in Boston. “People today often want very bite-sized pieces of information. However, science is fundamentally more nuanced than a one-liner or the 280 characters in a Twitter post,” Robbins explained in a hospital news release.
More than 60% of U.S. adults say they used the internet to find health information, the study authors noted. The researchers then compared these popular videos to ones from credible sources. These were identified by a YouTube feature that places content from health care systems at the top of search results for health-related terms.
Sleep experts then assessed the quality of information, using various health communications assessment tools. The findings showed that 43% of videos that got the highest number of views were made by bloggers; 33% were produced by medical professionals; and 24% by health coaches.