Most people really love their gadgets. After all, how can you resist playing with it when, every few months, they come out with a newer, flashier, smaller, faster, and just plain better version of your favorite device. It's too much for any person to resist! With one little object you can keep track of the people you love, watch YouTube videos, and check up on any responses to your internet dating profile. How can you let go?
Even though it's hard, it's a good idea to give your objects a break sometimes. Am I going to go on talking about how the government is trying to control your brain through subliminal messages on your cell phone, or how you're going to get testicular cancer by carrying it around in your pocket? Nah. I'm actually going to talk about a couple of the real, proven risks of using your favorite gadgets and devices. Because unfortunately enough, they do exist.
Cell Phone Elbow
You might think by the name that cell phone elbow has something in common with the other "rich person's disorder," tennis elbow. But it doesn't. Cell phone elbow is actually much more similar to carpal tunnel syndrome. Which makes it much more wily and difficult to treat.
Symptoms of Cell Phone Elbow:
The signs of cell phone elbow start off small. First, you just feel a little soreness or even just irritability in the elbow. Over time, it gets worse, until soreness and numbness move down into the hand (specifically in the last two fingers of the hand). With time, you hand becomes clumsy, your elbow is sore, and the disorder begins to seem truly debilitating.
Why it Hurts:
Unlike something like tennis elbow, cell phone elbow doesn't have anything to do with muscles and tendons. It's about nerves and blood. Here's how it happens. When you talk for hours at a time on your mobile phone, you keep your elbow flexed at a greater than 90-degree angle during all that time. When your elbow is bent this way for long periods of time, the nerve gets stretched. Over time, blood flow to the nerve is reduced; and the longer you stretch the elbow, the more risk you're at of injuring the nerve.
Treatment:
If you catch it early enough, you can generally reverse the damage by reducing cell phone usage, or by simply switching the arm you hold your phone with when you talk. Doctors can also give you braces and other tools to help increase blood flow to the nerve. But if you let it get to far, the damage can be permanent, and you can even lose muscle control in the hand.
Text Thumb
Teenagers send an average of something like 80 text messages a day. But it's not just teens that are addicted to their mobile phones. Adults are constantly sending text messages, too. When you spend the whole day pressing your thumbs into buttons, you really are risking an injury. It doesn't just stop at blisters and sore spots, either. You can actually do permanent damage from over-texting.
Symptoms:
Text thumb symptoms can range from things like small sores, red spots, and blisters on the bad of the thumb, to pain, lack of control, and numbness in the tendons at the base of their thumb and fingers.
Why it Hurts:
The injuries you sustain when texting too much are actually repetitive stress injuries, just like you might get (to a larger scale) by running or any other high-impact activity. Sometimes they are minor and easily reversible; but if left untreated, they can cause serious problems.
Treatment:
The treatment for "text thumb" is going to depend on the severity of the condition. If treated soon, you may simply need to take special medication and reduce the amount of texting you do. But if you leave it too long, doctors may have to apply a splint to your hand, or, in a worst case scenario, operate on the hand itself.
It's nice to be able to make a date with the hottie from that internet dating site, or know the score of the game, or gossip about a co-worker from any place and at any hour of the day. But all of that convenience does come with some risk! Reducing the amount of time you spend using your mobile phone can be a great way to reduce that risk. And as a bonus, it'll also give you more time to actually, you know, spend with the people you care about.
