Viral Milk Crate Challenge Is Dangerous NJ, But That's Obvious

By now you've probably seen the videos — or at least one of them — circulating on any of the major social media sites. The milk crate challenge was a viral video trend du jour in recent weeks, causing numerous laughs, freeze frames and plenty of memes to spread across the Internet world.

For those who aren't up to speed: milk crates are stacked in ascending order sometimes up to above head-high, and then in descending order, creating a working pyramid of flimsy, horribly balanced crates that someone climbs like a makeshift staircase.

The only problem for most people is it ends very, very badly.

As with a lot of things on the web, the humor comes from another person's pain; sometimes emotional, sometimes physical. In this case, it's almost all physical.

The challenge has entered many a video of someone falling from the top of the stack after swaying back and forth like a boxer after taking a Mike Tyson haymaker, only to see their body position itself with their legs over their head, crashing to the ground as a crowd erupts with laughter from behind a cellphone camera.

If you're having trouble imagining it, here's an example. (Video contains explicit language.)

That video is pretty much what you can expect to see from the rest of them, but there are a few occasional winners.

For the most part, though, the trend has become so dangerous that one of the social media sites that saw the challenge trend, TikTok, has banned the videos from the platform. The trend became so popular that even doctors have had to come out in opposition to it, stating the obvious that anything which puts you in a position to fall on your head from 6-feet in the air is dangerous.

Shawn Anthony, an orthopedic surgeon at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, told the Washington Post that others in the medical field are seeing a litany of injuries which include broken bones and torn rotator cuffs. He called the trend a "dangerous Internet challenge."

Henry Schuitema, chief of emergency medicine at Jefferson Health in New Jersey, told the post that his hospital treated a patient who broke their ribs during their attempt at the challenge.

"So many of these injuries we’re seeing are preventable just by being intelligent," Schuitema said.

"If you catch a corner of one of those crates, it’s going to be problematic. It looks like something funny, but real people are getting real injuries."

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