Plastic Surgery on YouTube

Area of Science:

• Medical Media Analysis
• Plastic Surgery Content
• Social Media Research

Background:

• YouTube hosts vast medical content, but plastic surgery content remains unexamined.
• The platform's potential for medical information dissemination is significant.
• Understanding current content trends is crucial for strategic engagement.

Purpose of the Study:

• To analyze the prevalence and characteristics of plastic surgery content on YouTube.
• To identify dominant content types, authorship, and engagement metrics.
• To assess the platform's utilization by plastic surgeons for educational purposes.

Main Methods:

• A systematic analysis of the top 20 most-viewed plastic surgery videos per search term.
• Classification of videos by content type, uploader, views, and likes.
• Data compilation and analysis using Microsoft Excel (2016).

Main Results:

• "Patient experience" emerged as the most frequent content type (out of 280 videos analyzed).
• Medical centers and personal accounts were primary uploaders (30% and 29%, respectively).
• Entertainment content dominated when "plastic surgery" was the search term (60%), while educational videos comprised only 6%.

Conclusions:

• Plastic surgeons are not fully leveraging YouTube's reach.
• The entertainment industry effectively uses the platform for high viewership.
• There is a notable scarcity and low quality of educational plastic surgery content on YouTube.