It was a pain worse than childbirth, a TikTok mom said as she described bouts of uncontrollable vomiting after consuming marijuana.
“I was crying and screaming and I said, ‘I can’t take this anymore!’ I hate my life,” she said. “I’m begging God, please stop!”
Dubbed “scromiting” by social media because of the combination of loud screaming and vomiting, the medical name for the condition is cannabis hyperemesis syndrome, or CHS, which is on the rise in the United States. Regular cannabis users, including teenagers, show up in emergency rooms complaining of severe intestinal distress.
“They’re squirming, they’re holding their stomachs, they’re 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 continue to vomit whatever they have in their stomach, which can go on for hours,” Wang told CNN in a previous interview. “I often say they took a hot shower before coming 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 undergo a battery of tests to rule out other causes: blood and urine tests, expensive CT scans, unpleasant upper gastrointestinal endoscopy and gastric emptying tests, to name a few.
For some teens, those tests might be repeated over and over again.
“For some of our children, this is their fifth emergency room visit in the past two months with symptoms they can’t control,” Wang said.
And if they wait too long to get in, the condition can be life-threatening.
“Whether it’s cannabis hyperemesis syndrome or another virus that makes you throw up a lot,” Wang said, “if you let it go too long, you can have electrolyte disturbances, go into shock, and have organ failure. CHS is no different.”
A strange state
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 vomiting. The researchers followed nine of the patients over time and found that symptoms disappeared when cannabis use was stopped, but returned when it was restarted.
Strangely, more than half of the 19 reported using extremely hot baths or showers to self-treat their symptoms. As more and more cases of CHS began to appear, the hot bath as a home treatment became a recurring theme.
“It’s pretty universal for these patients to say they need a very, very hot shower or a very hot bath to improve their symptoms,” he said.
The medical name for “scromiting” is cannabis hyperemesis syndrome. – ProfessionalStudioImages/iStockphoto/Getty Images
why hot “It’s not completely 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, accesses pain receptors in the body, so one theory is that the distracting sensation of extreme heat breaks the pain cycle, thereby relieving symptoms.
To add to the strangeness of the disorder, THC and other cannabinoids from the marijuana plant have been used to relieve pain—paradoxically relieving nausea and vomiting in cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy. However, despite marijuana’s popularity as a pain reliever, the results of studies on its effectiveness have been mixed.
However, why would the same compound relieve and also cause pain? Among a multitude of possibilities: dosage levels. Wang points to the increasing potency of THC in today’s marijuana products.
“It’s well documented that the amount of THC now coming into cannabis is increasing substantially,” Wang said. “In the ’90s, the average was 4 percent or 5 percent. Now in Colorado, it’s 15 percent to 20 percent.”
Another mystery: Not all heavy weed users are affected by CHS.
“It’s not entirely clear who is prone to getting it,” Wang said. “Is it a certain frequency or duration of use? Is it a certain potency? Or is it a certain type of product? We don’t have that data.”
CHS is growing
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 that nearly 1 in 5 people hospitalized for cyclic vomiting in the United States reported concurrent cannabis use.
After Colorado legalized recreational marijuana in 2012, Wang and his colleagues found more than 800,000 reported cases of cannabis-induced vomiting in Colorado between 2013 and 2018. That’s an increase of about 29 percent since legalization, Wang said. The study, published in September 2021, found that the rate was highest in counties with no prior marijuana dispensation.
A newer study, published in July 2025, found that emergency room visits for teens ages 13 to 21 nationwide increased more than 10-fold between 2016 and 2023. Yet another study in November 2025 found that the rate of CHS among adults ages 18 to 35 rose sharply during the pandemic and has remained high for years.
However, all of these studies were limited by the lack of a medical diagnosis or insurance billing code to allow objective tracking of CHS. To do the studies, 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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