It was a pain worse than childbirth, the mother of TikTok said as she described episodes of uncontrollable vomiting after using marijuana.
“I was crying and screaming and I was like ‘I can’t take this anymore!’ I hate my life,” she said. “I’m begging God, like please make it stop!”
Called “scromiting” by social media due to the combination of screaming and loud vomiting, the medical name for the condition is cannabis hyperemesis syndrome, or CHS, which is on the rise in the United States. Habitual users of cannabis, including teenagers, are showing up in emergency rooms complaining of severe intestinal distress.
“They’re walking around, holding their stomachs, complaining of really bad abdominal pain and nausea,” said Dr. Sam Wang, a pediatric emergency medicine specialist and toxicologist at Children’s Hospital Colorado, who treats teenagers with the condition.
“They vomit and then they just continue to vomit whatever they have in their stomach, which can last for hours,” Wang told CNN in an earlier interview. “They often say they took a scalding hot shower before they got to the ER but it didn’t help.”
Immediate treatment consists of anti-nausea medications and IV fluids to combat dehydration from vomiting. But patients also go through a battery of tests to rule out other causes: blood and urine tests, expensive CT scans, unpleasant upper GI endoscopy and gastric emptying tests, to name a few.
For some teenagers, those tests may be repeated again and again.
“For some of our kids, this is their fifth visit to the ER in the past two months, with symptoms they can’t control,” Wang said.
And if they wait too long to enter, the condition can be life-threatening.
“Regardless of whether it’s cannabis hyperemesis syndrome or another virus that makes you vomit a lot,” Wang said, “if you let it go on too long, you can have electrolyte disturbances, go into shock and have organ failure. CHS is no different.”
Strange condition
Cannabis hyperemesis syndrome burst onto the medical scene in 2004, when a group of Australian researchers wrote about 19 chronic marijuana users who had repeated episodes of abdominal pain and belching. The researchers followed nine of the patients over time and found that the symptoms went away when the use of cannabis was stopped but they started again.
Oddly, more than half of the 19 reported using very hot baths or showers to self-treat their symptoms. As more and more cases of CHS began to appear, hot bathing as a home treatment became a recurring theme.
“It’s pretty universal for these patients to say they need a really, really hot shower, or a really hot bath, to improve their symptoms,” he said.
The medical name for “scromiting” is cannabis hyperemesis syndrome. – ProfessionalStudioImages/iStockphoto/Getty Images
Why hot? “This is not entirely clear,” said Wang, who is also an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora, Colorado.
Tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the main psychoactive compound in weed, has access to the body’s pain receptors, so one theory is that the disruptive sensation of extreme heat interrupts the pain cycle, thereby relieving symptoms.
To compound the strangeness of the disorder, THC and other cannabinoids in the marijuana plant have been used for pain relief – paradoxically relieving nausea and vomiting in cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy. However, despite marijuana’s popularity as a pain reliever, study results on its effectiveness have been mixed.
Anyway, why does the same compound relieve and also cause pain? Among a large number of possibilities: dosage levels. Wang points to the increasing potency of THC in today’s marijuana products.
“It has been well documented that the amount of THC that now comes in cannabis is increasing substantially,” Wang said. “In the ’90s the average was like 4% or 5%. Now in Colorado, it’s anywhere from 15% to 20%.”
Another mystery: It’s not heavy weed users who are affected by CHS.
“It’s not entirely clear who is predisposed to get it,” Wang said. “Is it a certain frequency or duration of use? Is it a specific strength? Or is it a specific type of product? We don’t have that data.”
CHS is increasing
The data show that CHS is a national problem. Between 2005 and 2014 when only medical marijuana was legal in most states, a 2020 study found nearly 1 in 5 people hospitalized for cyclic vomiting in the United States reported concurrent use of cannabis.
After Colorado legalized recreational marijuana in 2012, Wang and his colleagues found more than 800,000 cases of vomiting reported due to cannabis in Colorado between 2013 and 2018. That’s an increase of about 29% since legalization, Wang said. The study, published in September 2021, found that the rate was highest in counties that had no previous marijuana dispensaries.
A more recent study, published in July 2025, found that emergency room visits for adolescents 13 to 21 years old across the nation increased more than 10-fold between 2016 and 2023. Another November 2025 study found that the rate of CHS among adults 18 to 35 rose sharply during the years of the pandemic and remained high 2202202020202020
However, all these studies have been limited by the lack of medical diagnosis or insurance billing codes to enable objective tracking of CHS. To do the studies, the researchers had to compare medical records of vomiting with documented or self-reported cases of marijuana use – data that many people refuse to provide.
That has changed. On October 1, 2025, a US federal committee created R11.16, an official medical diagnosis code for cannabis hyperemesis syndrome. The World Health Organization has done the same, allowing researchers around the world to better track the condition. Experts say future studies will be more precise, allowing researchers to shed more light on this unusual condition.
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