How Texting Can Give You A Permanent Pain In The Neck Next Avenue Next Avenue, Contributor. By Deborah Quilter, Next Avenue Contributor Ronda Savoy’s neck started aching about a year ago. “When my mother died,” the 57-year-old New York real estate broker says, “I started playing Words With Friends,” a smartphone game app that’s a lot like Scrabble. “It’s the game Alec Baldwin got kicked off a plane for playing. I played it in bed. But this put my neck in a horrible position.” Savoy had a history of neck and shoulder tension, and had worked hard to improve her posture. But after she started playing the game, she developed severe neck pain. “I can just feel the stress,” she says. “I have massages because my muscles are so tight across the back of my neck.” (MORE: A Writer (Me) Learns to Type All Over Again) Savoy’s chiropractor initially attributed her pain to stress. Months later, she found herself using the phone to text more often – and play Words With Friends – and her pain got even worse. Savoy was suffering from “text neck,” a very real malady associated with smartphone use. Savoy had a classic sign of the ailment, serious stiffness in her neck, but like many other 50-somethings, she’d had pain in the area before, making it harder to realize the phone’s role in her new problem. 2 Trillion Texts, Thousands of Achy Necks There’s no reliable estimate of the total number of people living with the stiffness, pain and muscle strain of text neck. But with 2.19 trillion texts being sent annually by U.S. customers, there are millions of potential sufferers. (MORE: Stop Slouching: Poor Posture Leads to Poor Health) It takes time, though, for awareness of a new condition to spread throughout the medical community. Some doctors who have never heard of text neck don’t think to ask patients with neck pain about their phone or computer habits. Worker’s compensation investigators, on the other hand, are well aware of the link between smartphones and neck pain, says Dr. Robert Markison, a hand surgeon and clinical professor of surgery at the University of San Francisco. And they’re using that knowledge to get cases dismissed. Since individuals’ text records are discoverable, claims examiners are now contacting service providers to find out how often claimants have been texting. “Then,” Markison says, “they call the consulting physicians and say, ‘This person is texting 30 to 40 times a day.’ They are trying to attribute the neck injury to personal texting rather than work.” Smartphones are an integral part of many people’s lives. But as research into the physical effects of using the devices has increased, scientists have discovered that neck pain may be only the beginning of phone-related problems. A 2011 study published in the International Journal of Occupational Safety and Ergonomics found that 53 percent of mobile phone users suffer numbness or neck aches. Another, potentially more troubling study, led by Professor Erik Peper of San Francisco State University and published in the journal Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback, discovered that 83 percent of subjects reported some hand and neck pain during texting — but also displayed other signs of tension, like holding their breath and increased heart rates. Participants in Peper’s study experienced these physical symptoms of tension while texting even when they believed they were relaxed, he reported.
Posted on: Thu, 25 Jul 2013 20:22:46 +0000
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