Love Taking Selfies? You Might Have A Serious Medical Condition
Not kidding.
By John Lim — 08 Jul 2016, 01:26 PM
It looks like the power of selfies is showing no signs of slowing down. So much so that the search for a perfect selfie can put you at risk of developing selfie elbow, which is slowly becoming a real medical condition!
Did you know around 17 million selfies are uploaded every week on social media? Yeah, that's a LOT of selfies.
Yup, you read that right! Like tennis elbow or golfer's elbow, an addiction to selfie taking can result in piercing pain in the elbow.
In a recent case, award-winning journalist and NBC’s Today show host Hoda Kotb went to a doctor complaining of pain in her elbow, Elle reported.
Kotb's doctor believes her elbow pain stems from her love of selfies - more specifically, the uncomfortable grip she was putting her hand in each time she snapped a selfie
“I went to the orthopaedist and he said, ‘are you playing tennis or ping-pong?’ I told him I was taking selfies,” Kotb was quoted as saying.
“When you take the picture, your arm is up, bent in a weird way and you just click, click, click — think about how many you take: 20, 30, or 40. Selfie elbow, everyone has it,” added Kotb, who is also a well-documented figure on photo-sharing website Instagram.
She was told by the doctor to do regular exercises and ease the pain with ice.
These type of injuries are actually nothing new and could be seen as variations of good old-fashioned repetitive strain injuries, like carpal tunnel syndrome
"Inflammation from taking selfies happens because you're extending your arm but also trying to keep a firm grip on your phone as you do — something that the body just isn't designed to do often," said Mary Ann Wilmarth, a doctor of physical therapy and spokeswoman for the American Physical Therapy Association.
washingtonpost.comWhat this means is you do something enough time like typing, texting or taking selfies - it's going to have consequences. Like carpal tunnel and tendinitis, it's the repetitive nature of the task that causes the aches.
"We used to see it with Blackberry phones. People would get tendinitis in their thumb because they were on their Blackberries all the time. You put too much stress on the muscle and it irritates the area where the muscle comes off the bone and you get this inflammatory response," said Dr. Jordan Metzl, a sports medicine physician at New York's Hospital for Special Surgery.
Luckily, it’s pretty easy to treat these sort of injuries with rest, ice, changing habits, regular shoulder and wrist rolls. Maybe it's also time to cut down on the selfies, guys!
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