What is scromiting? It’s a pretty scary sounding side effect of having too much THC in your system. A mashup of screaming and vomiting, the official title is Cannabinioid Hyperemesis Syndrome, or CHS for short.
CHS is back in the news because of a new study that came out recently showing that cases of CHS surged during the pandemic, and are still pretty high.
But that’s not all, as the World Health Organization has officially added CHS to the International Classification of Diseases on October 1st. This makes is much easier for physicians across the world to identify and track the diagnosis.
Scromiting mostly occurs after consuming some extremely high potency weed. The intense heaving, nausea, and vomiting sounds pretty hellish, and it’s something that can’t be relieved easily.
But not so fast, because an opinion piece in Stat10 is claiming CSH is overdiagnosed.
“Clinicians, particularly in fast-paced environments like EDs, may find themselves attributing any vomiting in a cannabis user to CHS. This sort of knee-jerk thinking is emblematic of the cognitive bias known as “anchoring” — wherein a clinician fixates on an initial piece of information (in this case, cannabis use) and fails to consider alternative or concurrent diagnoses,” writes Jordan Tishler for the site.
He goes on to claim that the anecdotes about CHS continue to rise and misdiagnosis is becoming a bigger risk, considering that it elongates the time in which an illness isn’t properly treated.
So we may be hearing more about scromiting, mostly due to how freaky it sounds. But be careful to smack the label on any vomiting symptoms.
Read the study from JAMA here.
