Editorial Commentary: Recognizing and Avoiding Medical Misinformation Across Digital Platforms: Smoke, Mirrors (and Streaming).

Abstract

The evolution of social media and related online sources has substantially increased the ability of patients to query and access publicly available information that may have relevance to a potential musculoskeletal condition of interest. Although increased accessibility to information has several purported benefits, including encouragement of patients to become more invested in their care through self-teaching, a downside to the existence of a vast number of unregulated resources remains the risk of misinformation. As health care providers, we have a moral and ethical obligation to mitigate this risk by directing patients to high-quality resources for medical information and to be aware of resources that are unreliable. To this end, a growing body of evidence has suggested that YouTube lacks reliability and quality in terms of medical information concerning a variety of musculoskeletal conditions.