Experts: Compulsive texting causing neck injuries
By Lily Dayton, Los Angeles Times
Dean Fishman, a chiropractor in Florida, was examining an X-ray of a 17-year-old patient’s neck in 2009 when he noticed something unusual. The ghostly image of her vertebral column showed a reversal of the curvature that normally appears in the cervical spine — a degenerative state he’d most often seen in middle-aged people who had spent several decades of their life in poor posture.
“That’s when I looked over at the patient,” Fishman says. She was slumped in her chair, head tilted downward, madly typing away on her cellphone. When he mentioned to the patient’s mother that the girl’s posture could be causing her headaches, he got what he describes as an “emotional response.” It seemed the teen spent much of her life in that position. Right then, Fishman says, “I knew I was on to something.”
He theorized that prolonged periods of tilting her head downward to peer into her mobile device had created excessive strain on the cervical spine, causing a repetitive stress injury that ultimately led to spinal degeneration. He began looking through all the recent X-rays he had of young people — many of whom had come in for neck pain or headaches — and he saw the same thing: signs of premature degeneration.
Parents of these mindless kids….you reap what you sow.
Gaspen,
Thank you for not reproducing. Can only imagine how mindless YOUR offspring would be!
Since the beginning of mankind the older generation has called each concurrent generation the worst ever. Yet we have progressed as a species (okay that statement might be arguable).
A cave man father comes home from a day of hunting and yells at his son, “Are you kidding? You wasted a whole day sitting in this cave drawing on the walls?”
Haddi: Sounds like I hit a nerve. Do you still use those I-pads/phones as a babysitter at dinner? God forbid there would be a family conversation. You don’t have to like any of it but the fact still remains. The kids are mindless key pad punchers.
You can spend all day arguing whether using electronic devices to communicate is a good, bad, or an indifferent thing. But what cannot be argued is that through the use of these devices, people are communicating their thoughts and opinions in a more efficient way, quicker, and to more people than ever in the history of mankind.
PS And to those that would bash others on a forum such as this for the use of texting and instant messaging, don’t forget what medium YOU are using in so doing to voice YOUR opinion. And to argue that doing so on this forum from your computer and texting or instant messaging from a phone is different, you’re simply arguing semantics!
GA, do you see the irony of the incredible technology created by free markets and innovation because of these devices? Yet you seem to mock them. It seems to me that free market folks would welcome this technology that has brought so much wealth to our country.
Dumbfounded: But I don’t nor do my kids have neck problems from chronic head-tilt syndrome. I agree it’s a great technology but come on…have you SEEN most people these days?! Most are so buried in their texting or whatever, a bomb could go off and they’d miss it. You can’t argue with reality.
Compulsive commenting on laketahoenews.net causes chronic dumbassery.