TIKTOK’S MILK CRATE CHALLENGE BECOMES ONE OF A THOUSAND WAYS TO DIE

People around the internet are, once again, bored enough to try anything even if it ends in a trip to the hospital. In the latest social media challenge, the Milk Crate challenge, participants are tasked with climbing up a tower of empty milk crates that are arranged like a staircase. Each crate is balanced halfway over the next, ascending and then descending in a triangle shape. And while the result looks something like a scene from a Super Mario game, there were also face plants, and probably some broken bones as a result.

The challenge started becoming popular in mid-August after one person posted a video of a man slowly climbing up the milk crates. Right as he reaches the top, he misses his step and the crates, along with the man, fall and he hits his face on the plastic crates on his way down. Another video shows a woman in heels beating the challenge, as everyone else looks on in silence while she slowly makes her way up to the top and back down the other side. And one more rendition of the trend shows a man falling, just before reaching the top of the crates and landing in a pretty precarious position with a crate right in the middle of his back. Most of these videos tend to end with some pretty bad looking injuries. It really hurts to watch, but it is so hard to look away.

This challenge isn’t the first irresponsible internet trend to make the rounds in the last year, as millions of people have been bored sitting at home trying to find ways to keep themselves entertained during the coronavirus pandemic. There was the dry scooping challenge, a TikTok trend that involved eating a dry scoop of pre-workout powder, which led to at least one person going to the emergency room with a heart attack. Some people tried the basketball beer challenge, where they placed a full bottle of beer on top of a basketball and let the ball drop. On its way back up, the challenge was to catch the beer bottle, which sometimes resulted in face injuries. And finally, an honorable mention for one trend involving a drill and a corn on the cob, which left singer Jason Derulo with a few chipped teeth. There has to be better and safer ways to pass the time.

Meanwhile, doctors have commented on the dangers of the challenge. Dr. Shawn Anthony, an orthopedic surgeon specializing in sports medicine at Mount Sinai in New York said that the challenge has resulted in many orthopedic injuries. “Injuries can include broken wrists, shoulder dislocations and meniscus tears, as well as life-threatening conditions like spinal cord injuries,” Dr. Anthony warned.