“RN here, taking care of a patient who stopped taking her blood pressure meds and started taking TikTok supplements instead. Her 12-year-old children found her down after a cardiac arrest. She’s now anoxic, and the family is deciding if they want to keep her body alive (her mind is gone) or let her pass naturally.”

I'm a Senior Staff Writer based in New York City, where I've been covering classic BuzzFeed-style content since 2020.

"Came here to say this one. The number of people unwilling to just wear a condom in 2026 is absolutely wild."

"Vaping. People honestly think sucking a chemical concoction heated in a cheap plastic canister is 'healthy' because it’s not 'smoking.'"

"It's insanely bad in some parts of the UK. My sister has been waiting a couple of years for a kidney transplant, but the waiting list is full of teenagers with 'ketamine kidney.'"

"It affects the filtration rate and can allow far too much liquid to go into your bladder, making you wet yourself and damaging the filtration system of your kidneys. It can also cause your anus to prolapse.

"It damages the kidneys as a side effect of the negative effect it has on the urinary tract. Because of this, long-term ketamine use will eventually cause kidney failure."

"I know someone a decade younger than me who attends some of the same events/festivals I do, she does/did a lot of ket. It's not uncommon to see her traipsing about the next day, trying to sort things out because she shit or pissed herself in the night. It's something I wouldn't touch with a bargepole, unless it was an actual prescribed thing for a hospital procedure, and even then, I would see if there was an alternative. I can't imagine being in my 20s and dealing with incontinence, especially considering it could have been entirely avoidable."

"Therapist here, it's getting more severe each year. Developmental delays because of screen time once in elementary, and almost no emotional regulation. Brains grow through adversity and challenges, not being spoon-fed information. Figure out that math problem, sound out that word, and sit with your emotions."

"I'm a nurse, and we've been having discussions about this for a while. I don't envy you guys in mental health. So many people don't realize the harm they are doing and refuse to even consider the fact that staring at their phone every spare moment, doom scrolling, and chasing that next dopamine hit is actively harming them in multiple ways."

"Physician and parent here…agree 100%. Between the helicopter parents and tablets, kids these days seem completely incapable. Zero attention span. Zero problem solving. Zero ability to cope without being fed a constant stream of stimuli. There is also this level of apathy that I find really worrisome. I grew up with encyclopedias and libraries, but we would seek out information all the time. My kids have every resource at their fingertips, and if they ask a question I don't know the answer to, I'll suggest they look it up online, and they are just like 'nah' even though it would take them about five seconds at most."

"My hospital implemented tablets as part of a secondary registration process. I can't even get patients to look up at me to tell me their complaints. At least 10x a day, I have to tell patients to ignore the tablet and talk about their problems in real life. Teenagers and adults think nothing of scrolling TikTok on their phones while I'm trying to have a conversation with them. WTF. These people came to me for help."

"Oh my gosh, so much this. I'm seeing so many young adults in my office who struggle with basic life skills and with incomplete coping skills. So much anxiety and sleep issues. And they always attend with an overinvolved parent, usually the mother, who indulges them and feeds off them. So many are unable to hold down a job or attend school. It's endemic."

"It also leads to physical health issues as well. Every year, at least three coworkers on my team are hospitalized. We are all 25-35 years old. Being allowed time to rest is very important."

"Hustle culture is the new tobacco for young people."

"I did the sleep thing with 4-6 32 oz cups of coffee while working two full-time jobs for six years, trying to pay off lingering debt from divorce years prior. I wrecked my body. Did poor hours again, taking care of a partner with cancer, for almost four years shortly after.

It messed me up badly. Beyond the health issues it caused, I can't sleep through the night anymore, and my memory is shot. I fall asleep randomly throughout the day. It's awful."

"I've worked in a few large warehouses, and the entire workforce basically runs on energy drinks and codeine. Literally everyone walking around with energy drinks and supplying each other with painkillers if they run out, all because they are too afraid to take time off for injuries that have happened as a result of working there. "

"My friend’s wife was a 50-year-old hard-driving career woman who drank at least two five-hour energy drinks a day. She had a stroke 15 years ago and has not recovered the ability to do much. Practically brain dead...Such a shock."

"It's going to get so bad as we all get older, too. Just about everyone should be weight training to some degree if you want to vastly improve your quality of life when you're older. Like practically every single health marker that we can measure improves with increased muscle mass. Walking and cardio are great too, and a good starting point. But it can't be understated how important resistance training is."

"For these drugs, you need to start at a low dose, something like 0.25mg, and titrate slowly to 0.5mg, a month later, and maybe a month until the next titration. What we are seeing is people who have NEVER taken these meds starting at a mid-tier dose like 0.5mg or 0.75mg, and over the next day or two, they develop the worst abdominal pain and constipation. We take their history, do everything to rule out the differentials such as pancreatitis, cholelithiasis, and gastroenteritis.

The pain from taking a higher-than-starting dose is difficult to treat. You feel like you are dying, but we can only give so much morphine; Toradol doesn't do shit, unless we sedate you, you're going to be in excruciating pain.

I will say I know plenty of people who have had zero issues with GLP-1 drugs, who have both taken it for diabetes control and weight loss. Just don't take anybody else's medication.

"I'm a nurse for inpatient eating disorders, and the Ozempademic/social media are literally KILLING PEOPLE. Bodies are not a trend!!! Ceasing eating/drinking fluids leads to deadly electrolyte shifts, gastrointestinal paralysis, and more. We had a patient recently die of sepsis in her 20s after an intestinal torsion due to her gastroparesis. Please don't go down this path, people."

"I'm an inpatient pediatric nurse. Had my first kid 'OD' on his parents' weight loss injections. He started stealing them because a girl he liked said he was too 'fat.' His pediatrician ended up prescribing him one after his hospitalization. Poor guy wasn't even big."

"I picked up a patient in the ambulance a little bit ago who huffed some nitrous oxide and had really bad second-degree chemical burns in her mouth. It had swollen up her vocal cords to the point where she couldn’t talk just before we got there.

It resolved enough that we didn't have to sedate/paralyze and intubate, and she was able to maintain her own airway, but the lower right side of her face was numb and drooping. We made the hour-long drive down to the only burn center in town, just for us to roll into the hospital and have her get mad at the wait time. She hopped off the stretcher, refused care, and left.

I hope she went back and got some help because if she didn't, there’s a decent chance she's dead."

"Just took care of a patient who abused nitrous oxide, and they were suffering from some pretty bad nerve issues in their legs. They described it as if their legs were always asleep."

"This happened to me. Nitrous causes B12 deficiency, which is crucial for nervous system function. Extended use causes neuropathy. At the height of my use, my entire lower body, from just below the nipple line and down to my feet, was in a constant state of numb tingling. I had difficulty walking, because it's hard to walk when you can't feel your feet. I am just over two years clean now, and most of my nerve function has returned. The bottoms of my feet will forever be kinda numb, though.

Also experienced SEVERE cognitive decline during heavy use. Was unable to follow even the simplest conversation. If someone spoke to me, I would often be confused and take several seconds to formulate a response. This is highly out of character for me, who in general would be considered well spoken and intelligent."

"As a paramedic, I cannot understand why people think it's fine to deliver at home without a midwife.

I wouldn't even be comfortable delivering at home in general. Midwives are incredibly competent and capable, but I would still want to be somewhere that could do things like an emergency C-section if need be."

"We see at least three e-scooter-related injuries per day, some equivalent of regular bike injuries, but most are post-op fractures of femurs/tibias. Some don't make it into their two-week post-op because they are still in the ICU…so yeah, e-scooters are hazardous."

"E-scooter accidents are now the leading cause of traumatic brain injuries (TBI) in children admitted to the pediatric neurosurgical center at Children's Health Ireland, Temple Street. This is despite the fact that it is illegal for children under 16 to use e-scooters on public roads."

"I work in the ER, and one of our most common trauma activations outside of old people falling is young people crashing their e-bike or e-scooter. And some of those people come in really fucked-up. Broken bones, faces looking like they got jumped, etc. All because they hit a small pothole or rock or something going 30+mph."

"I saw a post recently from someone insisting he was going to cure his wife’s autoimmune disease with peptides from the internet. He said her meds were no longer working (an unfortunate reality of being on medications for life), but it turned out she was only taking the meds when she felt bad, which isn't how the meds he mentioned work."

"The supplement thing gets me, too. I see people at my gym downing eight different powders and pills, and they couldn't tell you what half of them actually do. A friend was spending $200 a month on gut health stuff that turned out to be mostly magnesium and sugar."

"We routinely struggle to convince people with large, independently funded, multicentre, double-blind trials involving thousands of participants. As if all they hear is one person's recommendation. Psychologists have known for decades that vivid stories are more persuasive than statistics, and that confidence often masquerades as competence. We are wired for anecdotes, not evidence. And for those who forego their logical brains, it can be absolutely exhausting to attempt to challenge their literally baseless, pointless belief system.

The growing rejection of the scientific method is deeply troubling. Science is not a belief system. It is a process designed to find the truth, test it, challenge it, replicate it, and keep testing it again.

A civilization that loses faith in that process is not progressing. It is drifting back toward the dark ages, one influencer recommendation at a time, with their cancel culture and attacks on science being no different that past inquisitions."

"RN here, taking care of a patient who stopped taking her blood pressure meds and started taking TikTok supplements instead.

Her 12-year-old children found her down after a cardiac arrest. She's now anoxic, and the family is deciding if they want to keep her body alive (her mind is gone) or let her pass naturally."

"People self-diagnosing and treating mental health conditions based on TikTok videos. I'm seeing patients stop prescribed meds or start dangerous supplements because a 60-second clip told them to. The placebo effect wears off, but the real damage doesn't.

"GI doc. General distrust of medicine is it for me, too.

The number of times I have to explain that, *no,* despite XYZ influencer saying XYZ study found that your Crohn's is caused by your diet, *IT IS NOT,*' is only rising. Second place is explaining that you need a legitimate treatment protocol for your colon cancer/Crohn's/etc because it is a disease, not because I'm *hiding* some secret 'natural cure' from you. I promise."

"Erosion of public trust in medical professionals. It's coming from a lot of sources, but Sick-Tok, other social media, pretty much every news source, and of course, our fearless government leaders are spreading misinformation way too fast to overcome by educating our patients, and vilifying doctors along the way. It makes it impossible to build a therapeutic relationship and counsel patients effectively about their health because they either don't trust us, think they know better than we do because they asked ChatGPT, or both."

"Got to see my first newborn death from this a few weeks ago. Massive head bleed. Family then proceeds to get their church and everyone they know involved 'praying for a miracle.'"

"I see these patients decades later, if they survive, when they need care for residual neurologic conditions related to brain bleed (epilepsy, headache, motor deficits, and so on)."

"Especially nice after the mother had an epidural. 'I don't want my baby getting shots!' Is there a word for dumb irony?"

"When I sense one of the types that I know won't listen to a word I say, I've begun to just start with a 'this is a vaccine-preventable illness. Is there anything I can say that might change your mind about getting your child vaccinated?' Most of the time, they just say 'No.'

We are at a point that people are unwilling to listen to evidence. They've made their 'informed' decision based on 'research' they've done online, and are unwilling to hear anything that contradicts it. Not even the fact that their kid could be admitted for days to weeks on end is going to sway their opinion.

It's absolutely mind-boggling to me the way some of their minds work. Feels like they're putting their pride over their own children's health."

"I had to treat a case of fucking diphtheria not long ago. Diphtheria has been gone for so long that they didn't even really teach it to us at med school, beyond 'this used to be a big deal but you'll probably never see it'. Fuck anti-vaxxers. I don't care so much if their choices only harm them, but when their kids are dying, it pisses me off so much."

"What drives me absolutely wild is that these parents think they're making an informed choice for their own family in a vacuum. They completely forget that their unvaccinated kid is a walking vector who can kill the newborn in the waiting room who is literally too young to get their MMR shot yet."

"Saying 'I'm not a pill person.' I come across this a lot lately.

I'm a vascular surgeon. A lot of the 'pills' I'm recommending are for chronic disease processes, so I usually just nod my head and shrug in that situation…

But when someone comes in with acute limb ischemia and will require lifelong anticoagulation, I really have no other option than to discuss with them that they could:

–Have a catastrophic stroke if this were an embolus from the heart–Lose a fuckin arm or a leg because they 'aren't a pill person'–Any other myriad of complications as a result of arterial thrombosis."

'I don't want to be reliant on pills for the rest of my life or become addicted.' Are you addicted to toothpaste? Water? Shoes?"

"I am a Ph.D. psychologist who works in primary care. Everyone thinks they have ADHD while simultaneously they dont sleep enough, have untreated trauma, abuse substances, etc. These things need to be dealt with *first*."

"People blaming everything on ADHD because they watched some TikTok videos and think they have it too, and that it explains everything wrong in their life."

"The ADHD thing is debilitating for people who actually have it and are genuinely harmed by it. It's not a cute quirky manic pixie dream girl thing where you get free stimulants forever!"

"True story: a friend of mine was hospitalized for full-body edema. The doctors were stumped, and he lay there getting sicker; he was a healthy young man in his prime. It took his dad getting bored enough to read the package of licorice tea he was drinking, to work out that 12 cups of that day would have mad side effects, including edema. He's fine now."

"I'm a nurse; I think there's not enough public education on interactions for medicines. St John's Wort, for example, is just a flower but interacts with so many medicines. Same with grapefruit. So sometimes I think the public genuinely doesn't know/understand that it's important to disclose all of this stuff."

"Years ago, my family encouraged me to go on an appetite suppressant to help me lose weight. They said it was easy and I could get it from a doctor online. The doctor was in Utah, and I was in California at the time. He had no way to measure my vitals and just prescribed it to me.

A few weeks later, I went to see a doctor in person because I was concerned about symptoms that she would ultimately diagnose as Type 2 Diabetes. I also had massive hypertension that needed to be addressed, and she said the appetite suppressant was making it worse.

People, go see doctors in person. Tell them everything you're taking. Be honest with them about your symptoms. And don't be afraid of bad news because doing nothing will get you worse news."

"Colon cancer at a young age largely due to never eating fiber."

"I have been seeing lots of younger men with DVTs (venous blood clots) and strokes (arterial brain clots) who are on Testosterone replacement therapy. Also had a 38-year-old man that had a prostate over three times the size of normal after taking Testosterone. The guy could barely pee on his own! There are some significant side effects to this stuff!"

"Testosterone/steroid use is rampant now among physically 'fit' men. It often doesn't put you in good shape because your muscles are so out of proportion with your cardio fitness. Sure, you can lift like 250 pounds once, but you can't run a mile.

Seems to be a cosmetic drug rather than about actual fitness."

"I’m a dentist and have worked in both rural areas and urban areas.When I see kids whose parents refuse fluoride because of some woo-woo science (and there’s more and more of them) and X-rays, and the kids end up needing treatment under general anesthetic to pull multiple teeth out, I feel like screaming.It’s not like they are improving their diet, or even making the kids brush better.This is happening more in urban areas.

Most of my patients in smaller towns/rural areas are so much more aware of the benefits of both fluoride and regular checkups and X-rays, because they have experienced firsthand how both have improved dental health in just one generation."

"Another problem is extreme diets doing damage to the intestinal system, especially diets where people only eat one type of food for so-called health reasons.

Lastly, the unchecked usage of these peptides for almost everything. Boys as young as 12 are using hormones for muscle growth and testosterone because some American guy told them on YouTube to do it."

"And then nobody is taught food safety, so it's like 'why do I shit my guts out whenever I cook?' and it's because you left it on the counter for six hours and also used your raw chicken cutting board for the salad. "

"Not a doctor, but I live in a sunny area, every year when I get a skin checkup, my response that I do use sunscreen, yields a bigger sigh of relief.

I had to ask if they were joking this past year because it was so animated, and they explained that it's becoming more and more common to believe that prolonged sun exposure is a good thing."

"SPF is never a bad idea at any age, but please god, take the retinol away from the elementary schoolers."

"I do infant mortality review, and yesterday I just commented about how I'm starting to see more neglect and possible abuse cases! I've had cases where families had multiple babies dying, where they should have lost custody after the first. Resources are just getting strangled, and helper workers like myself are struggling with a lot right now. It's hard to try and move the world for your work and then be fearful you aren't essential enough to keep the job."

"I read about how this trend would happen as more people were forced to have babies due to changing laws around abortion. Whether or not one believes in the right to abort, the fact remains that if someone who doesn't want a kid is forced to have a kid, they won't automatically become a good parent. There will be more abuse and more neglect."

Submissions have been edited for length/clarity.