YouTube Isn't Really a Viable Way to Learn CPR

You can learn almost anything on YouTube, but you probably shouldn't trust it in matters of life and death, like learning CPR. Or at least that's what a team of scientists at the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine found.

Researchers from the furthest reaches of Australasia—Turkey—looked at "educational videos from the last three years accessed via YouTube when the search terms 'CPR,' 'cardiopulmonary resuscitation,' 'BLS' and 'basic life support' were entered." The CPR guidelines were updated in 2010, so any videos added in the last three years should be fair game, right?

On the contrary, according to results published in the journal Emergency Medicine Australasia, most of the YouTube videos on CPR training aren't actually up to date. "Most were excluded for a variety of reasons, including being irrelevant, being recorded in languages other than English and being accompanied by advertisements." In the end, only 11.5 percent of the videos that the researchers looked at were "found to be completely compatible with 2010 CPR guidelines with regard to sequence of interviews," the study stated.

Now, obviously excluding videos for having ads or not being in English is pretty Anglo-centric, but then, it's YouTube and a study by researchers associated with an institution based in Australia, so take all of this with as much salt as you need.

And another thing to consider is that, really, since CPR is designed to circulate blood for someone who has had a form of cardiac arrest, it's not going to work 100 percent of the time. In fact, the success of CPR mostly depends on a medical professional arriving to help. In New York, the success rate for CPR is a paltry 5.35 percent. With proper training and using the new "hands-only" technique, that success rate rises somewhat.

So it is better than nothing, and for people who are the authority in the area—teachers, lifeguards, camp counselors, etc—CPR training is justifiably often a required part of the job. Even though watching videos, as I recall, is a big part of that training, just watching a YouTube video won't get you all the way to competent. That's certainly what I found when I was searching for benga guitar techniques, and no one's lives depend on that.