It’s not often that we see a new condition appears in our clinic at Hands on Health but with the massive surge in the use (and overuse) of smartphones and ipad’s we are now seeing many patients suffering from the new phenomenon of ‘Text Neck’.
Text Neck is a repetitive stress injury to your neck or cervical spine caused by constantly looking down at your smartphone or tablet pc. It commonly presents itself with headaches, painful neck, tight and sore shoulder muscles and an increased curvature of the spine.
Whether seated or standing, we overwhelmingly hold our tech devices at stomach or chest level when using them. This inevitably places our head in a bent forward or flexed posture for a cumulatively long period of the day. Our head weighs approximately 5kg and when held in front of our natural centre of gravity a large increase in the stress of our cervical spine joints is experienced. The increased pressure on the neck joints results in muscle and ligamentous injury as they try to counteract the increased forces upon them. Finally with the increased activity of muscles in the area and stress to the joints and soft tissues we may experience headaches and over the long term a deformation of the normal curvatures of the spine.
Here are 5 simple steps you can take to help prevent Text Neck: