• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

33 Charts

  • About
    • What is 33 Charts?
    • Bryan Vartabedian MD
  • Blog
  • 33mail
  • Foci
    • Social/Public Media
    • Physicians
    • Patients
    • Hospitals
    • Information
    • Process/Flow
    • Technology
    • Digital culture
    • Future Medicine
  • The Public Physician
Information, Physicians

When Surgeons Learn from YouTube

March 8, 2016 By Bryan Vartabedian · Reading Time: < 1 minutes

businessman with gas mask watching TVA study in JAMA Facial Plastic Surgery this month reports that 64% of plastic surgeons describe having used online videos to learn new procedures.

What’s remarkable isn’t the 64%, but the fact that the study drew so much attention. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. The Internet, after all, is typically seen as a sewer of misinformation. Good medical information comes from textbooks. And forget Wikipedia.

A couple of thoughts:

Surgeons learn by watching. This isn’t breaking news. So it shouldn’t be any surprise that surgeons would learn on the most ubiquitous video platform in the world. A more interesting study would have been to examine how many surgeons learn by reading things printed on compressed pulp.

Good educational content is good no matter where it lives. Information is now shared in more dynamic, fluid spaces than printed text books. When we view educational content through a 20th century lens, learning from YouTube videos is seen as shocking.

The crowd is the editor. When every plastic surgeon in America references and refers to one amazing rhinoplasty video, it represents social peer review. Plastic surgeons, like patients, are smarter than you think when it comes to recognizing what’s worthy of their attention.

The Internet actually is a sewer of misinformation. Sturgeon’s Law dictates that 90% of everything is crap. But the problem is that we don’t know which 90%. We need the wisdom of the crowd coupled with practical sensibility. The challenge with open access educational content comes with medical trainees who lack the capacity to recognize reliable sources.

When mobile phones were new we counted the numbers of doctors using them. We will have arrived when we stop publishing papers about how many doctors learn watching videos.

Related Articles

  • American College of Surgeons Connects Rural Surgeons
  • Snapchat as Plastic Surgery's New Medium
  • Literacies for 21st Century Physicians

Tagged With: Medical education

Related Articles

  • American College of Surgeons Connects Rural Surgeons
  • Snapchat as Plastic Surgery's New Medium
  • Literacies for 21st Century Physicians

Primary Sidebar

Bryan Vartabedian, MD

Bryan Vartabedian, MD
Bryan Vartabedian is the Chief Pediatrics Officer at Texas Children’s Hospital North Austin and one of health care’s influential
voices on technology & medicine.
Learn More

Popular Articles

  • The Fate of Fired Cleveland Clinic Resident Lara Kollab
  • Cures Act Final Rule – How It Will Change Medicine
  • 12 Things About Doximity You Probably Didn’t Know
  • Should Physicians Give Their Cell Phone Number to Patients?
  • Doximity Dialer Video – Telemedicine’s Latest Power Player

Sign up for 33mail newsletter

Featured Articles

100,000 Connected Lemmings

The Case for New Physician Literacies in the Digital Age

The Rise of Medicine’s Creative Class

Will the Future Need Doctors?

Reactive and Creative Spaces

  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter

Footer

What is 33 Charts?

With a mashup of curated and original content that crosses the spaces of digital health, media, communication, technology, patient experience, digital culture, and the humanities, 33 charts offers unique insight and analysis on the changing face of medicine.

Founded in 2009 as a center of community and thought leadership for the issues doctors face in a digital world, 33 charts was included in the National Library of Medicine permanent web archive in 2014.
Learn More

Foci

  • Digital culture
  • Digital Health
  • EHR/Health IT
  • Future Medicine
  • Hospitals
  • Information
  • Patients
  • Physicians
  • Process/Flow
  • Quality
  • Social/Public Media
  • Technology

Copyright © 2023 · 33 Charts · Privacy Policy