JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Due to the increased use of artificial turf, turf burn has become a common sports injury caused by exposed skin sliding on artificial turf. Health complications such as MRSA outbreaks, sepsis, and pneumonia have been linked to untreated turf burns, and many athletes have been turning to social media for advice and companionship regarding their sports injuries.

Objective:

The goal of the study is to categorize and quantitatively assess the percentage of turf burn posts on TikTok based on the creator, content, and the athlete’s experience. With this data, we not only investigate if there is room for health care professionals to assist in the distribution of evidence-based health education to athletes to counteract misinformation, but also investigate if there is a potential audience of athletes on TikTok who have the potential to develop problematic responses to their injuries.

Methods:

Using the Discover page on TikTok, we searched for the word “turf burn” on October 17, 2021. 100 videos were used. Videos were categorized and analyzed by the creator, content, and experience of the athlete. Likes and comments were recorded.

Results:

Most of the videos (98/100, 98.0%) were created by athletes while only a small fraction of videos (2/100, 2.0%) were created by health-care professionals. Content wise, most of the videos (67/100, 67.0%) displayed the turf burn. A small amount of videos (15/100, 15.0%) showed the incident when the turf burn was acquired while nearly a quarter of the videos (23/100, 23.0%) demonstrated treatment/prevention of turf burns. Out of 23 treatment/prevention videos, a minority of the videos (4/23, 17.4%) showed accurate treatment of turf burns while most of the videos (19/23, 82.6%) showed inaccurate treatment. The smallest amount of videos (2/100, 2.0%) were about education of turf burns. Most of the athlete videos (56/98, 57.1%) depicted negative experiences the patient had with turf burn. Some of the videos (37/98, 37.8%) depicted neutral experiences while the smallest amount (5/98, 5.1%) depicted positive experiences.

Conclusions:

Our observational study suggests that there is a potential audience of athletes on TikTok who could develop problematic responses to their sports injuries such as turf burn, as most of the people who post videos are athletes and many of the posts demonstrate a negative experience associated with the turf burn. TikTok is a growing social media platform that should be studied to see if it can be used to create a social support group for injured athletes to prevent the progression of their negative emotional responses into problematic responses. Physicians should also have a role in establishing their social media presence on TikTok and offer evidence-based advice to athletes while disproving misinformation that is present on TikTok.