Ridiculous? Text Neck

My wife shared this with me. What do y'all think?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...coming-an-epidemic-and-could-wreck-your-spine

 

I'd love to hear what Dr. Sarno or another TMS doc has to say about this.

Sounds ridiculous to me. And since the study is published by a spine surgeon, it seems like an example of "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail".

 

Thanks for sending that article about smartphones and neck pain.
I don't own a smartphone, i-phone or any other handheld device.
I prefer being barely in touch with others than being in constant touch.

I wonder what smartphones do to cause anxiety and other symptoms in the head (the brain).

I was lunching last week in a restaurant with a father and son, and the son was on his iPad
more than he was with us. And the son was no preteen or teenager. He is a 40-year-old man
living in his parents' home and I doubt he pays them anything. He's a good kid, though,
but he's totally connected to those electric minidevices.

 

I think the human spine is quite strong and durable enough to stand looking down at an iPhone or iPad without causing it to "degenerate". I do wonder though about the intrinsic psychic stress associated with being absorbed into cyberspace 70% of the day and night?

 

Walt, I think they do cause a level of anxiety for some. I know when I was in my corporate job, my smartphone represented somewhat of a chain to my boss, to the ongoing projects, and to my team. It certainly had a link to my stress levels. I was always looking at it for new messages when I wasn't at my desk.

Bruce, I agree with you about our spines being durable enough to withstand looking down. What's sad is how many people will read that and spread the news via social media... how many cases of text neck will there be? I recall there was a similar article some time back about thumb pain related to typing on the smartphones too.

 

If anyone has any doubts about the intrinsic strength of the human spine, Erique, just take a drive down to Ocean Beach and visit the primate cage in the San Francisco Zoo and take a gander at those leapin' lemurs. They can swing by their "degenerating" shoulders and do back flips all day with their "degenerating" spines and vertebrae without laying in their dens moaning about their aches and pains. Heck, human beings are primates like lemurs too. All the talk in that article about a 60 lb stress on the neck from the weight of the head leading to "degeneration" sounds completely ridiculous to me. Too bad such nonsense, as you point out, will get disseminated among the general public who will repeat it until it acquires the force of fact. Talk about monkey see, monkey do!

 

I noticed today that my head is in the same position as described in that article when I read a book. Yet, I never heard of "reading neck".

 

Yes, ridiculous! This article is all over my FB feed. Human's having been looking down at their hands since we've had hands! Yet somehow, in the last five years our necks have lost the strength to hold up our own heads.

 

The obvious fix for the text-neck epidemic will be the Google Glasses.

 

Developing nations are way ahead of Silicon Valley on devising solutions to the text-neck crisis:

https://www.google.com/search?q=african women with stretched necks&rlz=1C1CHWA_enUS602US602&espv=2&biw=1280&bih=639&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=Wl24VI72K8aKyASt-IDACg&ved=0CCUQsAQ#tbm=isch&q=women with stretched necks

 

Exactly!!

 

Hey, maybe Google is behind all of this as a ploy to market their gadget!

 

I know.. it's crazy!

 

Except that Google is discontinuing sales of its Google Glasses:

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-30831128

Maybe too many people were getting sore necks from the added weight?

 

Does anyone want to buy an Apple Newton and a Google Glass, both slightly used?