Do You Have Cell Phone Elbow?

CNN has a story about a phenomenon called "cell phone elbow." Instead of focusing on the thumb, fingers, hand, or wrist, this story focuses on the elbow.

You may have heard of BlackBerry Thumb and even PDA Nail. But have you heard of cell phone elbow? To the medical community, this may be called: cubital tunnel syndrome (no, not carpal tunnel which is in the wrist/hand area).

Cell phone elbow (or cubital tunnel syndrome) occurs when a nerve in the arm gets damaged because you're tightly bending your elbow for long periods of time. As a result, you may get numbness and tingling in your pinkie and ring fingers (which nerve is being pinched? Answer = ulnar nerve). According to Dr. Peter J. Evans, the director of the Hand and Upper Extremity Center at the Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio, cell phone elbow "could impede your typing ability, your writing ability." In other words, it could get very serious.

The tips provided in this article include the following:

• Avoid activities that require the elbow to be bent tighter than 90 degrees.
• Fix workstations so the elbows aren't overly flexed.
• Don't lean on your elbows for an extended period of time.

Image source: CNN

Health Effects of Texting in Teens

Do you text? I'm not a huge fan of texting, but I tweet like crazy (however, most of my tweets are automated). Teenagers and other young people have taken texting to an entirely new level by creating a language of acronyms that can only be understood for those who are familiar with texting. According to the Nielsen Company, teens sent and received an average of 2,272 text messages per month in the fourth quarter of 2008. Wow!

The NY Times has an article on the health effects of texting. Physicians and psychologists are worried about anxiety, distraction in school, falling grades, repetitive stress injury and sleep deprivation. That doesn't sound good, does it? The article quotes Sherry Turkle, a psychologist who is director of the Initiative on Technology and Self at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Here's a snippet of the quote: "Among the jobs of adolescence are to separate from your parents, and to find the peace and quiet to become the person you decide you want to be," she said. "Texting hits directly at both those jobs."

Frequent typing on tiny thumb keyboards can also cause BlackBerry thumb.

BlackBerry Thumb to PDA Nail

• Look at my thumbs doc! I thought technology was supposed to improve health, not cause new medical problems! I've already had BlackBerry thumb because of Twitter. I think I'm going to sue RIM and Twitter because now, I'm getting PDA Nail!

Sound ridiculous? Well, BlackBerry thumb is a type of repetitive motion injury that is becoming more prevalent among working professionals who Twitter, I mean who use their BlackBerry for corporate e-mail. People who use their mobile smartphones for hours each day are even developing dystrophic nail changes that some clinical experts are calling PDA nail. The Am J Clin Dermatol. 2009;10(3):193-6. has a case study (two cases actually) titled, "The 'PDA Nail': Traumatic Nail Dystrophy in Habitual Users of Personal Digital Assistants."

Here's a snippet: "We describe two cases of traumatic thumb nail dystrophy associated with using a PDA keyboard for several hours per day... In conclusion, biomechanical stress resulting from overuse of PDAs may result in various types of nail dystrophy. We suggest the general term 'PDA nails' for these nail abnormalities."

So, what do your thumbs look like? Are your nails turning dystrophic? Image Source: Access Emergency Medicine I