Teenagers Who Watch These Online Videos Are Developing This Strange Medical Condition
It started with just a few kids at first. They were showing symptoms of a nerve-based disorder. And from there, the situation escalated — until children all around the world were behaving the same way. But the strangest thing? Experts think YouTube could be the cause.
Unusual outbreak
The whole thing seemed to spread like a virus, and German psychologists found themselves at the center of the outbreak. They were suddenly swamped by patients exhibiting the exact same symptoms. It was the start of a true medical mystery.
Internet phenomenon
It wasn’t the first internet phenomenon to spread, of course. Remember cat breading? If you don’t, you’ll almost certainly have heard of the infamous Tide Pod challenge, where folks online dared one another to chew laundry detergent tablets. But while you know Tide Pods are bad for you, you wouldn’t expect watching a simple YouTube video to cause you any harm.
Further investigation
There seemed to be something weird going on with the kids, though, and the professionals narrowed down the source to a specific YouTube channel. Sounds odd, but that didn’t stop them from looking further into the whole phenomenon. Yes, researchers have tried to get to the root of the problem: what the kids were experiencing and why. And what they’ve found is truly fascinating.
Symptom symmetry
The woman who rang the alarm bell was Kirsten Müller-Vahl, a doctor at Germany’s Hannover Medical School. She’s a practicing psychiatrist, and the first thing that struck her — after the number of sudden admissions, of course — was how her patients behaved. Müller-Vahl had noticed something truly bizarre.
