What is scromiting? It’s the graphic nickname that took over TikTok and Reddit for a real and rising medical condition tied to heavy cannabis use, and emergency rooms across the country say the cases keep climbing. The term is a mashup of screaming and vomiting, coined by social media users describing the brutal combination of intense abdominal pain, uncontrollable vomiting and the kind of pain that makes people cry out, according to Cleveland Clinic. The medical name is cannabis hyperemesis syndrome, or CHS, and it is not internet exaggeration. It is a documented condition showing up in hospitals with increasing frequency, especially among younger patients.
@fox32chicagoA Chicago emergency doctor tells ChicagoLIVE why more young adults — especially ages 18 to 30 — are showing up with “scromiting,” the slang term for cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome, where chronic cannabis use triggers uncontrollable vomiting.
CHS itself was first described in medical literature back in 2004, when doctors in Australia identified a pattern of cyclical vomiting in longtime cannabis users. The slang term scromiting came much later, spreading through viral videos of people, often young women, describing episodes so painful they compared them to childbirth. What was once treated as a rare, obscure diagnosis just got a lot more official. As of October 2025, CHS received its own dedicated diagnostic code, R11.16, making it easier for doctors nationwide to track and report cases, according to the University of Washington’s Alcohol and Drug Abuse Institute.
That new code appears to be revealing just how widespread the problem already was. Emergency department visits tied to CHS jumped sharply in the months after the code took effect, and the increase was steepest among people between 15 and 24 years old, whose visit rate more than tripled compared with before the update and far outpaced the national average, according to a CDC data breakdown. Virginia has reported emergency visits for the condition climbing almost 29 percent since 2020, with similar spikes flagged in Massachusetts, Northern California and parts of North Carolina. What is scromiting doing to hospitals right now is straining resources, since patients often undergo expensive imaging and testing before doctors land on the real diagnosis.
Health experts had long assumed CHS mainly hit people who had used cannabis heavily for years. The newest data flips that assumption, showing younger users developing symptoms much faster than expected, sometimes within the first year of regular use. Dr. Sam Torbati, medical director of the emergency department at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, said patients arrive in real distress, not high, but doubled over in pain, vomiting and gagging. Experts point to today’s far more potent cannabis products, including high-THC vapes and concentrates, as a likely driver behind why younger bodies are reacting faster and harder than earlier generations of users did.
There’s a cultural angle to what is scromiting worth sitting with too. Research out of Massachusetts found that people between 18 and 34 face a higher risk of developing CHS, and so do Hispanic and Black individuals. A separate nationwide study found the condition was notably more common in the South, even though the highest rates of cannabis use are concentrated in states where recreational weed is already legal, which are mostly outside that region. For a culture where cannabis use is heavily normalized in music, social media, and everyday life, that data is worth paying attention to, especially since CHS still only affects a small percentage of people who use cannabis regularly.
CHS tends to move through three phases. First comes months or years of morning nausea that people often try to treat with more weed, then a hyperemetic phase marked by relentless vomiting that can last a day or two, then a recovery phase once cannabis use stops completely. Hot showers or baths are a well-known workaround for what is scromiting, offering temporary relief by interrupting the pain signal, but they don’t treat the underlying cause, and symptoms return with continued use, according to Cleveland Clinic.
The only proven way to prevent or resolve CHS is cutting back or stopping cannabis use entirely, since symptoms typically fade once someone stops and can return the moment they start again. Anyone dealing with cycles of severe vomiting and abdominal pain, especially alongside regular cannabis use, should talk to a doctor and be upfront about their usage rather than relying on hot showers to push through it. Being honest with a provider is often the fastest route to the right diagnosis instead of months of unnecessary tests and repeat ER visits.
