Is TikTok empowering or endangering the well being of youngsters and youths within the U.S.? As an emergency doctor, I typically ask myself that query.
There are some positives to the platform. Tendencies that go viral there are reshaping how younger individuals have interaction with popular culture, well being schooling, and even life-saving expertise. Children have extra entry than ever to studying how to answer emergency conditions; for example, when a celeb overdose sparks TikTok tutorials on tips on how to use Narcan, or consultants educate individuals hands-only CPR utilizing catchy fashionable songs like Chappell Roan’s “Pink Pony Membership”. (It was time for an replace: instructing chest compressions to the rhythm of “Stayin’ Alive” by the Bee Gees isn’t precisely essentially the most related reference for Gen Z.)
However the identical platform which educates one consumer might mislead or hurt one other.
Harmful TikTok tendencies popularize reckless habits, costing susceptible youth security, shallowness, and typically even their survival. Children as younger as eight have died from self-strangulation after doing the Blackout Problem, for example, the place customers deliberately attempt to choke themselves till they lose consciousness.
Emergencies have turn into content material to be consumed. I’ve seen the implications firsthand within the younger individuals within the emergency division whose lives are eternally altered by mimicking what they first noticed on social media.
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I’ll always remember caring for the 14-year-old lady who had swallowed the contents of a bottle of Benadryl one night in 2021 whereas doing one thing known as the Benadryl Problem, a TikTok pattern the place teenagers chase hallucinations by ingesting poisonous doses of allergy drugs. As an alternative, she suffered extreme coronary heart injury—and it took the whole lot my staff and I needed to save her life. She had freshly painted sky-blue nails, a element that also stays with me. A reminder that she was only a baby, lured by a viral problem that almost took her life.
Additionally imprinted on my thoughts is an evening throughout residency after I cared for a younger lady severely burned by scalding water. She had seen a viral video on Twitter the place individuals mixed a choreographed dance with throwing scorching water into the air for dramatic impact, then tried to copy it at dwelling. She was disfigured and in agony—her childhood interrupted not accidentally, however by algorithm. As I dressed her wounds, I saved picturing her years from now, at her marriage ceremony, in a white gown, nonetheless bearing the scars. And beneath the heartbreak, I felt a deep, simmering anger: how one thing so reckless and preventable might go away such a long-lasting mark on somebody so younger. That have was a chilling instance of how platforms form habits.
However it was removed from remoted. Just a few years later, in March 2025, I used to be working the Saint Patrick’s Day Parade as an EMS doctor marketing consultant with the Chicago Hearth Division after I noticed tons of of youngsters sitting on the fringe of the green-dyed Chicago River ingesting alcohol out of 2-gallon jugs. These are identified on social media as BORGs (quick for “blackout rage gallon”) and had by no means seen teenagers carry them round till this yr. The police had them dump out the jugs to forestall public intoxication. It wasn’t simply the alcohol or the recklessness that struck me—it was the normalization of all of it.
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From falling off precarious pyramids within the Milk Crate Problem to being violently tripped within the Skullbreaker Problem, younger individuals have suffered damaged necks, turning into instantly paralyzed and sustaining mind injury and head trauma in pursuit of likes and shares. TikTok is unintentionality proving that virality can come at a steep—and typically lethal—price.
Watching these movies—youngsters risking their lives for likes—is chilling. They’re tough to endure, but they rack up thousands and thousands of views. What does it say about us that we are able to’t look away? The reality is, we’ve grown desensitized—and the true query isn’t simply what’s improper with TikTok, however what’s gone improper with us? That query cuts even deeper for me, as a result of I’ve devoted my life to saving these youngsters—standing at bedsides as mother and father say goodbye, doing CPR on youngsters on frozen winter nights, doing the whole lot I can so that they have one other probability. And in these moments, I want I might attain via the cellphone to inform them to stop scrolling or to place their cellphone down and select warning and care over a reckless act they are going to come to remorse.
TikTok has the facility to save lots of a life, however the content material being amplified has the potential to finish one, too. So what are we to do on this age of duality the place each issues can ring true? A part of the reply lies in reclaiming duty—being current for our youngsters, guiding what they eat, and holding ourselves accountable, too. As a result of our youngsters aren’t simply scrolling—they’re chasing viral thrills, drawn in by tendencies which might be dangerously seductive to younger, creating minds. We will’t let the algorithm give approach to another accident.
