Social media is awash with disgusting medical-themed videos involving everything from doctors popping pimples to extracting ingrown hairs. But what can explain the popularity of these gut-churning clips and why do so many people love watching them so much?

These videos can rack up thousands, hundreds of thousands or even millions of views. One of the most well-known channels, Dr. Pimple Popper, has more than 15 million followers on TikTok, and over 2 billion views on YouTube.

One clip posted to TikTok in June, 2021, with the caption “Happy Sunday” shows a spot slowly being squeezed with an extractor tool. It has since been viewed almost 65 million times.
This kind of footage regularly provokes a feeling of disgust, which is generally thought to be a negative emotion. According to Daniel Kelly, a professor in the Department of Philosophy at Purdue University, and the author of Yuck!: The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust, this emotion evolved to primarily protect us from two things—potentially poisonous foods and contagious diseases.