When Tiktok -Trends send children to the First Aid

Kwist ticks the health of children and teenagers in the US? As an emergency doctor I often ask myself that question.

There are some positive points on the platform. Trends that go viral are reformed how young people deal with pop culture, health education and even life -saving skills. Children have more access than ever to learn how to respond to emergency situations; For example, when an overdose of celebrity pops Tutorials about how to use Narcan, or experts learn people who only learn hands-all-resuscitation with catchy modern songs Such as Chappell Roan’s “Pink Pony Club”. (It was time for an update: Teaching breast compressions to the rhythm of “Stayin” Alive by De Bee Gees is not exactly the most relevant reference for Gen Z.)

But the same platform that trains one user can mislead or harm another.

Dangerous Tiktok-Trends make reckless behavior, which cost vulnerable youth safety, self-respect and sometimes even their survival. Children so young as eight died of self-strangulation after doing the blackout challenge, for example, where users deliberately try to suffocate themselves until they lose consciousness.

Emergency situations have become satisfied to be consumed. I have seen the consequences in first -hand among young people in the Emergency Department, whose life is changed forever by simulating what they saw on social media for the first time.

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I will never forget the care for the 14-year-old girl who had swallowed the contents of a bottle of AppriLlic one evening in 2021 while he was done in 2021, while he did something called the Appryl Challenge, a Tiktok trend in which teenagers chase hallucinations by taking toxic doses of allergy medicine. Instead, she suffered serious heart damage – and it cost everything my team and I had to save her life. She had freshly painted sky blue nails, a detail that still stays with me. A memory that she was only a child lured by a viral challenge that almost cost her life.

Also in my mind is printed, a night during the residence when I cared for a young girl who was seriously burned by changing water. She had seen a viral video on Twitter where people combined a choreographed dance with hot water throwing in the air for dramatic effect and then tried to replicate it at home. She was deformed and in pain – her childhood not accidentally interrupted, but by algorithm. As I dressed her wounds, I kept taking over her years, at her wedding, in a white dress, still wearing the scars. And under the heartache I felt a deep, simmering anger: how something so reckless and to be prevented could leave a permanent stamp on someone who is so young. That experience was a horrifying example of how to shape Platform’s behavior.

But it was far from isolated. A few years later, in March 2025, I worked on the Saint Patrick’s Day Parade as an EMS-Arts consultant at the Chicago Fire Department when I saw hundreds of teenagers sitting on the edge of the green painted Chicago River who drank alcohol from 2-gallon jugs. These are known on social media as Borgs (short for “Blackout Rage Gallon”) and had never seen teenagers wear until this year. The police had them throw away the jugs to prevent public intoxication. It was not only the alcohol or the recklessness that struck me – it was the standardization of all this.

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From the fall of precarious pyramids in the Milk Crate Challenge to violent stumbling in the skullbreaker -challenging, young people have suffered broken neck, suddenly being paralyzed and maintaining brain damage and head trauma when pursuing likes and shares. Tiktok is unintentionally that proves that virality can come a steep – and sometimes deadly -.

Watching these videos – teenagers who risk their lives for likes – is horrifying. They are hard to endure, but they get millions of views. What does it say about us that we can’t look away? The truth is that we have become insensitive – and the real question is not only what is wrong with Tiktok, but what’s wrong with us? That question cuts even deeper for me, because I dedicated my life to saving these children – getting up at beds while parents say goodbye, do resuscitation on teenagers on frozen winter evenings, do everything I can do, so they still have a chance. And at those moments I wish I could reach by phone to tell them to stop scrolling or putting their phone down and choosing caution and to ensure a reckless act that they will regret.