Blackberry Thumb - An Emerging Problem Worth Writing About

Repetitive stress injuries - they're a pain, they're restricting but worst of all, they're avoidable. 

BlackBerry Thumb: Real Illness or Just Dumb?

IC Pain 4U: Thumb Malady Said to Strike Frequent Text Messagers

ByDaniel J. DeNoon
WebMD Health News

Jan. 26, 2005 -- Do your thumbs hurt? If you're sending lots of text messages, you may have the trendiest new malady: "BlackBerry thumb."

 

Yes, you can peck out text messages with any finger. But users of popular wireless devices such as the BlackBerry type much faster by pecking out messages with their thumbs. Many people soon learn to type 40 words a minute.

 

Whatever your thumb-typing speed, lots of messages mean lots of repetitive thumb motions. And that could mean trouble, says Alan Hedge, PhD, director of the human factors and ergonomics research group at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.

 

"The thumb is not a very dexterous part of the hand," Hedge tells WebMD. "It is really designed as a stabilizer for pinch gripping with a finger. That is why you only have two of them, not eight. It is the fingers that have dexterity, not the thumb."

 

The full-size keyboard was designed with this in mind. One uses one's dexterous fingers for lightning strikes on the letter keys. One reserves one's relatively clumsy thumbs for the humble task of striking the spacebar.

 

"When you switch that around, you put a lot of strain on the thumb," Hedge says. "So if you persist in typing a lot of information with your thumbs, you risk injury."

 

Hand surgeon Prosper Benhaim, MD, associate professor of orthopaedic and plastic surgery at UCLA, agrees that too much thumbing could be injurious.

 

"Anything that causes repeat motion can predispose someone to injuries of various sorts, whether it is tendinitis or aggravating underlying arthritis," Benhaim tells WebMD. "These things can be made worse or even initiated by overuse. But thumb typing is very repetitive, and the keys are so small it makes it difficult to navigate around easily. Because it is so small, people are likely to press harder vs. a larger keyboard. So the thumb on the BlackBerry does more than you would do with your fingers on a keyboard.'

 

What kinds of injuries are possible?

 

"BlackBerry users include a significant segment of the population old enough to be developing arthritis - and this can aggravate it," Benhaim says. "And there different types of tendinitis. One is trigger thumb.trigger thumb. The other is de Quervain's tenosynovitis, involving the tendons on the side of the wrist right where the forearm joins the wrist. These tendons participate in controlling the thumb and are very sensitive to repetitive motions."

 

These kinds of injuries are not new. Back in the 1980s, these injuries had a different name - and a different blame, says hand-injury specialist Gary McGillivary, MD, assistant professor of orthopaedics at Atlanta's Emory University.

 

"This is like what they used to write about Nintendo thumb - they called it nintendonitis," McGillivary tells WebMD.

 

Video game players have sometimes come down with rather serious injuries, says David A. Allan, MD, PhD, director of the repetitive strain injury center and supervisor of occupational medicine at the University of Pennsylvania's Presbyterian Medical Center in Philadelphia.

 

"I saw one kid who just played and played video games for seven hours at a stretch," Allan tells WebMD. "His thumb was only a small portion of his problem - his whole arm was affected." Allen says the child had nerve damage in his shoulder as well.

 

But it's rare for repeat motion injuries to involve long-lasting nerve damage, Allan says.

 

Dutch Disease, Canadian Cure: Mental Health and the Knowledge Economy

Even if it were true that one sector were gaining at another sector’s expense, that is not evidence of a “disease.”  It is evidence of the economy.  That’s how it works.

Andrew Coyne, National Post

In the global knowledge economy, a country’s greatest strategic advantage is its capacity to discover and innovate.

Stephen Toope, National Post

Diagnosing the Illness

Canada’s manufacturing sector has taken a beating over the past several years.  The former mill town where I was born and raised (Cornwall, Ontario) is one of many communities across the nation that saw the majority of its jobs, tax base and community life blood pick up and move to greener pastures.

NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair blames this manufactured migration on Dutch Disease – the focus of the Canadian government on supporting our natural resource exports (ie. Alberta Oil) over other sectors of the economy.  To me, that’s like placing the blame for not having a job solely on the back of an unemployed person.  It’s a simplified interpretation of a far more complex picture.

Canada’s manufacturing loss has been to emerging economies, places like India, China and Brazil.  In these countries, employers have less obligations to their employees around payment, vacation, health and safety.  A rise in Canada’s dollar might be a stick discouraging manufacturers from continuing here, but lower responsibility costs elsewhere is just as much a carrot. 

What Canadians – and these manufacturers themselves – seem to forget is that these responsibility costs in Canada have resulted in a healthier, better educated populace with better access to services, opportunities and each other.  By empowering individuals and creating a more level playing field, Canada has increased the quality-of-life of its citizens.  It isn’t by chance that so many leaders and innovators, people ranging from Don Tapscott to Mike Lazaridis and Jim Basillie are Canadian (not always by birth, but definitely by experience).

Meanwhile, in other countries, the rights that Canadians fought for generations ago are in increasing demand in these surging economies.  Governments are being pressured to support their citizens, a responsibility that will inevitably fall back on the shoulders of industry.  Far from escaping responsibility costs in the Western World, these tumbleweed businesses have actually served to foster labour movements elsewhere.  It’s elegant, really, when you think about it.

Finding the Cure

Despite the positioning of Canada’s Finance Minister, Canadians are past the point of being willing to move to wherever to find work and take any job to make a buck.  Amiable lot though we are, we won’t stand for a return to the labour migrations of the Dirty 30s.  To Canadians, home and dignity will forever have a higher value than our dollar. 

That’s fine, because there is a growing industry out there that is less reliant on location for success.  In the Knowledge Economy, it doesn’t matter where you are in the world, only that you have access to the tools and training that foster innovation.  Empowered Canadians – people, again, like the author of Wikinomics and Growing Up Digital or the founders of RIM – are at the forefront of new technologies, new processes and new approaches to success.

Yet, Canada is also undergoing a labour rights movement.  Like many other Western countries, there is a growing focus on mental illness and the social and economic losses incurred by a poor understanding of how mental health works and how mental fitness is accommodated.  This unheralded business crisis has spawned strategies and studies in jurisdictions around the world.  Responses include plans like Canada’s first, national mental health strategy.

At the same time, we are experiencing the rise of the social entrepreneur – Conscious Capitalists who see profit as a stepping stone towards meaning and legacy, rather than an end in and of itself.  These entrepreneurs, conscious of the impact of their actions on future generations (as they themselves are the first generation of Canadians being told to expect a lower quality-of-life than their parents) are largely focused on reducing our national carbon footprint, not through expensive schemes but as a matter of efficiency.

Mental health and innovation – these two things are inextricably linked.  As the Occupy movement helps spurn mental health protests and as governments and industry increasingly turn to young entrepreneurs to craft tomorrow’s action plans, these two things will merge.

Inoculation

Canada is on the right track and has an opportunity to be a world leader in connecting cognitive ability and creativity, consciously.  While it is highly unlikely our manufacturing sector will ever recover, it is increasingly apparent we don’t need it to.  Natural resources aren’t a long-term sustainable enterprise, nor are current practices in Canada as environmentally sound as they could be.

Natural resource dollars stimulating the Knowledge Economy and empowering social entrepreneurs, however, is a win-win.  These Conscious Capitalists, with greater access to venture capital and partnerships with natural resource extractors, can find new ways to reduce the footprint of resource extraction on the one hand and explore new opportunities in the creative industry.

To fully harness the capabilities of creativity, we need to understand how it works and how to foster it.  That means, understanding the impact of work, home and social environments on cognitive development as well as a less stigmatic view on the underlying genetics.  Occupational Mental Health and Safety, Mental Fitness and a focus on Conscious Capitalism – it’s the same confluence of history we saw during the industrial revolution, only we’ve moved from physical well-being to cognitive well-being.

Welcome to the 21^st Century; welcome to the Conscious Society.

A Bold New Vision for Canadian Social Services: Networked Intelligence, the LPC and an Opportunity for RIM

 “Implementing a comprehensive unified communications solution, for example, allows organizations to maintain a common platform for all their communications needs. It provides a quickly-deployed, scalable environment to roll out needed features to different people within the organization.”

-          Chris Hummel, Guest-writing for Forbes

"We can perhaps shoot for a grander goal - a province that provides the best public services, delivered in the most efficient manner, in the world.  If this sounds impossibly ambitious, put the question anothe way: Why not?"

 - The Drummond Report

CONTEXT

RIM has seen better days.  As of this morning, the company’s stock had taken a 6% hit, dropping $1.09 to $16.15 on the TSE.

The cause of this is a familiar story – locked in a competitive model, RIM appears to have lost direction.  When it’s all about position, you lose forward momentum.  As that happens, others get ahead of you.  Besides RIM, this is exactly what has happened to the Liberal Party of Canada.

In other news, the Harper government is looking for every possible way to wash their hands of national responsibility, simultaneously firewalling executive function in the PMO.  Here in Ontario, everyone is waiting with baited breath for Don Drummond to come down from the mount with his Report On What To Do Next. 

This hesitancy makes sense.  The paradigm of the last century that has carried us thus far is stalled.  Our established, vertically-integrated institutions and models – some of which date back without much change to the 17^th Century – are not up to the task of managing the realities of the 21^st Century.

WHAT COMES NEXT: TURNING FIEFDOMS INTO A SYSTEM

Nature abhors a vacuum; you never see the end of one model without there being something else ready to expand and fill the void.  That something else is already here – it’s called Networked Intelligence, and like the Industrial Revolution and the Green Revolution before it, NI is slowly transforming the system to meet the needs of modern-day society.

If you’re reading my post, this is not news to you.  You found my article via Twitter or Facebook, or through a Google search; you may have posted a comment or passed it along to your friends.  That access and connectivity is, fundamentally, what NI is about.  It’s a model that smart businesses are employing in their operations, successfully.

An integrated, crowd-sourced, transparent framework is good business; it’s also proving to be smart politics.  Every successful political entity in North America employs a collaborative network for data input, storage and access – the really good ones make prodigious use of maps.  In his presentation to the LPC at their recent biennial, Don Tapscott encouraged the Party, as well as the country, to take it a step further.

“Imagine an integrated health care system,” suggests Tapscott.  Heck, take it even further – imagine a fully-integrated, plugged-in social service system.  Imagine being able to track down any service you need via an Ap on your mobile phone.  Not sure what service it is you need?  Plug in some search terms of symptoms, employment interests, etc. and your mobile device will point you in the right direction. 

Crowd-sourced, with the crowd including government, government agencies, Not-For-Profits, Private business and the average folk on the street, a social service network would instantly connect you with what you needed or wanted, or offer alternative suggestions that fit previous preference patterns.  The integrated nature of the network would show you which service locations were closest and how to get there.  Reading recommendations by past clients or tailoring your ask for language or accessibility concerns would help you personalize your choice of provider even further, saving time both for you and the service providers you won't go to now that you know you don't need them.  The use of colours and icons could add an Apple-like simplicity to the often labyrinthine and confusing service access portals and application forms.

This is not a stretch – Google Maps or Microsoft's Sharepoint are leaps and bounds down this road already.  Government service provision is playing catch-up.  Where the new carrot lies for government and the taxpayer is in the reduction of duplication, gaps and overlaps that will be realized through the transparency of integration.  Networks facilitate data collection, storage and analysis, too, meaning they could fill the census gap.

There are some concerns, you suggest:

-          What would a fully networked social services platform do to privacy?  What would prevent your health record or your criminal record from getting into the hands of your spouse, your children, your friends, your employer?

-          There’s something Big Brother/SkyNet about all of this.  I don’t like the idea of the existing world being replicated through an online platform.

-         Who would build this network?  How would the average person access it?  Even for the points where Networked Intelligence is a good idea, it’s completely unrealistic.

These are questions that are already being answered.  Privacy today is not what it was in our parents’ generation – it’s more like it was before that, when society was more rural and there was no keeping secrets.  In particular, the NetGen are accustomed to sharing information and doing so online.  While there are mechanisms to ensure privacy and ownership of information, we’re going to find moving forward that people will be less-and-less concerned about privacy and, as a side-benefit, will become more pro-social in their behaviour as their lives become increasingly open to scrutiny.  Lord knows politics will benefit from this.

In terms of building and selling the infrastructure (and ensuring proper access through personal, hand-held devices), I think there is a company out there with the technical experiential knowledge to take a crack at leading the way. 

RIM could get its game back; it would certainly provide them with a destination to head towards.

In terms of the fear of integration – this is a valid argument.    There are those who view progress with suspicion; a horizontally integrated system might not be the sort of thing they could get behind.

In politics, you can’t please everyone.  It’s foolish to try.  Smart strategy begins by taking something you believe in, determining who your audience is – and isn’t – and tailoring your policies and communications to connect with your audience and convince them voting in support of you is the absolute best thing they can do with their time.

OPPORTUNITY KNOCKING: FORTUNE FAVOURS THE BOLD

Whichever Party is going to champion a Bold New Vision of social service integration is going to have to accept there will be blocks of voters who won’t support them or their vision.  If you follow the demographic/voting trends, you’ll find that a lot of those voters form the backbone of Conservative support.  On the other hand, those that are preeminently engaged in and comfortable with all things online are youth.

Is there a Party in Canada that is looking for direction, is not tied to a particular block or restricted from embracing 21^st Century ideas?  I think there is.

Networked Intelligence is already here – business is benefiting from it in spades.  It’s only a matter of time – a short matter of time, I’d warrant – before demand and fiscal challenges dictates that government social services become fully integrated and networked, too.  It’ll take a company or companies with the background, expertise and comfort with risk that RIM should be embodying to make this transition happen. 

It’s a brave new world that needs a bold new vision to champion it – a torch the Liberal Party of Canada is uniquely positioned to pick up and RIM is well-placed to facilitate.

Welcome to the 21^st Century.