Epinephrine Auto-injector Use on YouTube: Is It Really Useful?

Abstract

Aim: Epinephrine is the best treatment for anaphylaxis and gives the best results if given within the first few minutes of a severe allergicreaction. An auto-injector is used by the patient or her/his relatives when the reaction happens. The Internet can be useful in the educationof these individuals as much as the education provided by the experts in this field. To the best of our knowledge, there is no study aboutepinephrine videos on YouTube. In our study, we aimed to evaluate the accuracy of YouTube videos on the use of epinephrine auto-injectorand their compliance to guidelines.Materials and Methods: In order to analyze the quality and compliance of YouTube videos on auto-injectors, the term “using epinephrineauto-injectors for anaphylaxis” was searched at YouTube in January 2015. The videos were then scored from 1 to 10 for reliability.Results: Of the 610 videos in our study, 210 were about epinephrine auto-injectors. It was found that there was a significant relationshipbetween reliability and uploader, upload date, video length and application model (p