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. Traits that go viral there are reshaping how younger folks interact with popular culture, well being schooling, and even life-saving expertise. Children have extra entry than ever to studying how to reply to emergency conditions; as an example, when a celeb overdose sparks TikTok tutorials on the right way to use Narcan, or specialists educate folks hands-only CPR utilizing catchy fashionable songs like Chappell Roan’s “Pink Pony Membership”. (It was time for an replace: educating 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 traits popularize reckless habits, costing susceptible youth security, vanity, and typically even their survival. Children as younger as eight have died from self-strangulation after doing the Blackout Problem, as an example, the place customers deliberately attempt to choke themselves till they lose consciousness. 

Emergencies have change into content material to be consumed. I’ve seen the results firsthand within the younger folks within the emergency division whose lives are without end altered by mimicking what they first noticed on social media. 

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I’ll always remember caring for the 14-year-old woman who had swallowed the contents of a bottle of Benadryl one night in 2021 whereas doing one thing referred to as the Benadryl Problem, a TikTok development the place teenagers chase hallucinations by ingesting poisonous doses of allergy drugs. As a substitute, she suffered extreme coronary heart harm—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 little one, lured by a viral problem that just about took her life. 

Additionally imprinted on my thoughts is an evening throughout residency after I cared for a younger woman severely burned by scalding water. She had seen a viral video on Twitter the place folks mixed a choreographed dance with throwing sizzling water into the air for dramatic impact, then tried to copy it at residence. 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 costume, 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. 

Nevertheless it was removed from remoted. A number of years later, in March 2025, I used to be working the Saint Patrick’s Day Parade as an EMS doctor with the Chicago Hearth Division after I noticed lots of of youngsters sitting on the fringe of the green-dyed Chicago River consuming 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 stop 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 folks have suffered damaged necks, changing into all of a sudden paralyzed and sustaining mind harm 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 hundreds of thousands of views. What does it say about us that we will’t look away? The reality is, we’ve grown desensitized—and the actual 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 children—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 likelihood. And in these moments, I want I might attain by the cellphone to inform them to stop scrolling or to place their cellphone down and select warning and care over a reckless act they may come to remorse.