Not required to watch videos to vote on them.

They may be topical, and they all seem to be.

But the ugly truth is that nobody making a YouTube video on almost anything provides anything more than their word that they’re using well vetted information. When someone is making health claims, the standard is way higher than when they’re casually talking about RC cars, or juggling

You may not be aware, but even board certified doctors can be full of shit. Plenty of doctors choose to make and sell outright scam products, while using their licence as the basis for their claims.

Now, if it were possible for a doctor to prove via demonstration on video that their claims are up to date, best practices, like you can with a chemistry video, or a woodworking video, it wouldn’t fall under the drek category for me. I wouldn’t down vote.

But they rarely can when making health claims. When they’re making health claims that go against current best practices on diet, it is most definitely drek. You can’t provide access to studies and the data behind them in that format unless you’re sitting there reading the publications on screen.

Then, like you said, you took the time to find a topical video. You said nothing about finding a video, vetting its claims, finding opposing data and evaluating it. Which is the standard necessary when making health claims.

Why am I the arbiter of quality? I’m not the sole arbiter. But I am someone that has worked with bariatric patients, their doctors, their nutritionists. I’m someone that reads jama articles for fun, and tend to be willing to w ade through the jargon to understand why best practices are what they are.

So, a video making health claims is an automatic bad video because YouTube doesn’t have the structure to give citations. Well, a channel could actually provide links in the description, or even list the citations. I’ve never seen one that does, and it’s still not useful to expect that someone go to YouTube, then check for those citations, then go and find them. That’s a bad post, even when topical. It’s too many extra steps to find actual data to support a claim.

Conversational videos about health do not have value. That’s regardless of what the conversation is.

Seriously, have you not run into any of the numerous jackass doctors selling their shit via infomercials, or hawking their own products in their practice, or ending up losing their licence for ignoring best practices? Just being a doctor does not mean you can make claims on YouTube and get a free pass on backing your shit up on YouTube.

With all of that in mind, it would be a waste of my time to go and watch a video to individually evaluate it for voting on lemmy. The general state of YouTube as a source is so poor that it can be dismissed entirely. It’s like using Playboy magazine as a source because they interviewed a doctor.