We are all active users, maybe even dependent, of our cellphones. Texting, chatting and emailing are part of our daily activities. But, have we thought of the affects towards our health, and I don’t mean because of the radiation that’s another subject, but what about our neck, thumb, arms and hand.
Well there are some diseases that have been already diagnosed by trauma and orthopedic. The excessive use of the keyboard, the repetitive movements the long hours and posture at the time of using the phone, causes pain in the joints of the hands, arms, neck and back and inflammation of the tendon, call tendinitis. But how can this be? If smartphones are designed to be comfortable even in excessive texting, why some of us can often have discomfort in our hands, wrists, necks, and back.
Normally we tend to slouch on small screens, putting pressure on our neck and upper back muscles and also because we have the habit of only using one thumb to text instead of several fingers.
Ewa Gustafsson, Peter W Johnson, Agneta Lindegård, Mats Hagberg in the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, wrote about a research named: “Technique, muscle activity and kinematic differences in young adults texting on mobile phones”, in which they study the texting technic in 56 individuals. Half of the participants develop diverse troubles in their neck, hand or arm and the others half had no symptoms. The reason found was that pressure applied on the tip of the thumb while texting is magnified at the base of the finger the nerves. Over time this can cause problems such as pain, swelling, wear on the joint, loss of strength and difficulties in motion of the hand.
Those individuals affected used to text in a stooped posture, which puts too much strain on the muscles of the neck and upper back. That is why a series of suggestion where written for us to take under consideration while we are writing a massage in our phone, this way we can avoid suffering any of the “text messaging diseases” or at least avoid does diseases that we already know of, because since it is a recent phenomenon and injuries can take years to develop we don’t know how our bad habits can affect our health in the future.
7 réponses à “Health and Texting”
Thanks! I am sure I suffer from this symptoms so I will follow your advice!
I have read that Repetitive Stress Injury (RSI)is a very common syndrome caused by texting and it occurs when too much stress is placed on one part of the body, in this case could be the thumbs. It could develop also in people who spend lots of time playing videos games and it appears to be more common on teenagers.
I found an interesting article that gives advice on how to prevent this type of injury and how to heal it.
http://solomonsseal.wordpress.com/2010/02/12/healing-texting-thumb-and-repetitive-stress-injuries-rsi-with-solomon’s-seal/
Sure cellphones are responsible of some kind of new diseases which didn’t exist before but it’s like with hard work such as worker, miner or farmer. The Body has to adapt. It is great to give such advice but I am not sure we should make such a big deal of it while we don’t care about working conditions. Cellphones are, for most of us, a toy not something we have to use in our work. So we should consider that for our own sake we need to slow down on it use, and if some diseases happen to because of cellphones it is our own fault.
But it’s interesting to know that there are some ways to avoid bad effects of our addiction !!
As you show in this very interesting article. Our posture while we use our cell phones and texting too much can lead to some pain, numbness and discomfort in different parts of our bodies such as: thumbs, hands, neck…
But there are other ways cell phones can affect our health:
-As I mentioned in my article “New Technologies To Sanitize Your Cell Phone”, cell phones have a lot of germs and microbes that can affect our health.
-Moreover, while we use our cell phones, while we are having a conversation, our capacity to concentrate is strongly reduced. That is why it is very dangerous to drive or to cross the street, while talking in our cell phones. Cell phones can cause us accidents.
-Cell phones can also affect us mentally. Some users become obsessed with their mobiles and think that their devices are always ringing or vibrating while it is not the case. They are also always checking if their mobiles are with them.
-Cell phones have a lot of metal components, such as nickel. For those persons who are allergic to metals, be in direct contact with their mobiles can cause them some allergies.
-Finally, mobile phones can expose us to loud noises. Playing the music in our phones too loudly can permanently damage our hearing.
If you want to have more information about this subject: Cell Phones and Health, check this article:
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/WellnessNews/story?id=7017768&page=1#.T705HdwWLvo
Very good advice. As a fellow addict, I’ll try to follow them. But as Alize said the better solution is to reduce our smartphone usage, though that’s not going to happen anytime soon.
But who knows? Maybe sooner that we expect we could text with our brains and we won’t need our thumbs, if Intel succeeds…
http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2009-11/intel-wants-brain-implants-consumers-heads-2020
This is an article quite interesting and obviously we all feel more or less concerned … But after having heard too often the dangers that could include cell phones on our brains, because of the waves, now we focus on the health effects of addiction to texting …. to believe that mobiles become our enemies! As you said Julio, maybe sooner we expect that we could text with our brains and our thumbs need we will not, therefore, when the phone without contact with our bodies will be invented?
I think that beyond the fact that we have to pay attention to our different physical uses of mobiles, it would be interesting to analyse precisely the impact of the mobile phone using on spelling and grammar. The syntactic level of students doesn’t seem to have improved since text messages appeared.
Thank you for this humorous and very informative article.
Although I agree extreme use of cellphones might have painful outcomes; I also believe that it also depends on personal awareness and habits. One might affect his or her posture in a very bad way while reading books even typing on their desktops. Additionally, the complaints in neck and posture is also a direct result of stress our lives; therefore it is very difficult to detect the exact cause of our back pains.