By Sandee LaMotte, NCS
(NCS) — It was a ache worse than childbirth, mentioned a TikTookay mother as she described bouts of uncontrollable vomiting after marijuana use.
“I was crying and screaming and I was like ‘I can’t take this anymore!’ I hate my life,” she mentioned. “I’m just begging God, like please make it stop!”
Dubbed “scromiting” by social media due to the mixture of screaming and loud vomiting, the medical title for the condition is hashish hyperemesis syndrome, or CHS, which is on the rise in the United States. Habitual customers of hashish, together with youngsters, are exhibiting up in emergency rooms complaining of extreme intestinal misery.
“They are writhing, holding their stomach, complaining of really bad abdominal pain and nausea,” mentioned Dr. Sam Wang, a pediatric emergency medication specialist and toxicologist at Children’s Hospital Colorado, who treats adolescents with the condition.
“They vomit and then just continue to vomit whatever they have in their stomach, which can go on for hours,” Wang told NCS in a prior interview. “They often say they took a scalding hot shower before they came to the ER but it didn’t help.”
Immediate remedy consists of anti-nausea medicines and IV fluids to fight dehydration from the vomiting. But sufferers additionally endure a battery of tests to rule out different causes: blood and urine assessments, costly CT scans, disagreeable higher GI endoscopy and gastric emptying assessments, to title a few.
For some adolescents, these assessments might be repeated many times.
“For some of our kids, this is their fifth ER visit in the past two months, with symptoms that they can’t control,” Wang mentioned.
And in the event that they wait too lengthy to are available in, the condition may be life-threatening.
“Regardless of whether it’s cannabis hyperemesis syndrome or another virus that makes you vomit a lot,” Wang mentioned, “if you let it go too long, you can have electrolyte disturbances, go into shock and have organ failure. CHS is no different.”
A bizarre condition
Cannabis hyperemesis syndrome burst upon the medical scene in 2004, when a group of Australian researchers wrote about 19 chronic marijuana customers who had repeated episodes of stomach ache and retching. The researchers adopted 9 of the sufferers over time and located signs went away when hashish use was stopped however returned when it was restarted.
Oddly, over half of the 19 reported utilizing extraordinarily scorching baths or showers to self-treat their signs. As an increasing number of instances of CHS started to seem, scorching bathing as a house remedy grew to become 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 mentioned.
Why scorching? “That’s not entirely clear,” mentioned Wang, who is additionally an affiliate professor of pediatrics at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora, Colorado.
Tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the foremost psychoactive compound in weed, has entry to the physique’s ache receptors, so one principle is that the distracting sensation of the excessive warmth interrupts the ache cycle, thus easing signs.
To compound the strangeness of the dysfunction, THC and different cannabinoids in the marijuana plant have been used for ache reduction — paradoxically relieving nausea and vomiting in most cancers sufferers present process chemotherapy. However, regardless of the recognition of marijuana as a painkiller, study results on its effectiveness have been mixed.
Still, why would the similar compound relieve and likewise trigger ache? Among a myriad of prospects: dosage ranges. Wang factors to the ever growing efficiency of THC in at the moment’s marijuana merchandise.
“It’s been well documented that the amount of THC that now comes in cannabis is increasing substantially,” Wang mentioned. “In the ’90s the average was like 4% or 5%. Now in Colorado, it’s anywhere from 15% to 20%.”
Another thriller: Not all heavy customers of weed are affected by CHS.
“It’s not entirely clear who is predisposed to getting it,” Wang mentioned. “Is it a certain frequency or duration of use? Is it a specific potency? Or is it a specific type of product? We don’t have that data.”
CHS is on the rise
Data present CHS is a nationwide downside. Between 2005 and 2014 when solely medical marijuana was authorized in most states, a 2020 study discovered almost 1 in 5 individuals hospitalized for cyclical vomiting in the United States reported concurrent hashish use.
After Colorado legalized leisure marijuana in 2012, Wang and his colleagues discovered over 800,000 instances of reported vomiting due to hashish in Colorado between 2013 and 2018. That’s about a 29% improve since legalization, Wang mentioned. The examine, revealed in September 2021, discovered the fee was highest in counties with no prior marijuana dispensaries.
A more recent examine, published in July 2025, discovered emergency room visits for adolescents aged 13 to 21 years throughout the nation elevated greater than 10-fold between 2016 and 2023. Yet one other November 2025 examine discovered the fee of CHS amongst adults 18 to 35 rose sharply throughout the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021 and remained excessive.
However, all of those research have been restricted by the lack of a medical prognosis or insurance coverage billing code to allow goal monitoring of CHS. To do the research, researchers had to evaluate medical data of vomiting with documented or self-reported instances of marijuana use — knowledge that many individuals decline to present.
That’s modified. On October 1, 2025, a US federal committee created R11.16, an official medical prognosis code for hashish hyperemesis syndrome. The World Health Organization did the similar, permitting researchers worldwide to higher monitor the condition. Experts say future research can be extra correct, permitting researchers to shed extra gentle onto this uncommon condition.
The-NCS-Wire
™ & © 2025 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.