YouTube may be gen-next dermatologist!

Popular video sharing website YouTube is not just helping people to watch latest World Cup football highlights, it is also allowing researchers, journals and health advocates to connect directly with the public on topics of skin cancer and prevention.
"No matter what field you're in, social media is the future of how we communicate around the world," said Chante Karimkhani, MD candidate in the lab of Robert Dellavalle, investigator at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.
The study queried YouTube for search terms related to dermatology including "sun protection, skin cancer, skin cancer awareness, and skin conditions."
Results included 100 videos with a cumulative 47 million views. The videos were shared a total of 101,173 times and drove 6,325 subscriptions to distinct YouTube user pages.

According to researchers, these results point to a new opportunity to disseminate research directly to the public.
"It used to be that researchers and journals depended on independent media to interpret their findings for the public. It could be a little like a game of telephone.

"Now through social media, journals can have their own presence - their own mouthpiece directly to the public that may include patients or health care providers or even other researchers," Karimkhani said.
In the field of dermatology, specifically, researchers see great promise in speaking directly to consumers of social media.
They point out that the tanning business is certainly on social media, "recommending tanning strategies and products to use for tanning. We need to be there as well," said Karimkhani.

For example, of the videos returned with the search query "skin cancer", 25 per cent were educational and another 25 per cent were what the researchers considered "complementary and alternative medicine videos."
Overall, only 35 per cent of videos across all dermatology search terms were uploaded by or featured a biomedical professional.
The researchers hope that as more academic institutions, researchers and journals recognise the promise and accept the challenge of social media, information directly from these credible and well-meaning sources may be able to change the popular conversation.
The study was published in the journal Dermatology.