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.

 

You Are Not Alone

“There are things I never thought I would do again. But there are lots of things I can do, so I don’t want people to think of me as a kid with arthritis. I want to be the same as everybody else,” she said.

This is a powerful little story about a girl with a condition unknown to most that, left untreated and unaccommodated, would destroy her life.  She is lucky to have the unwavering support of her parents and access to excellent medical care and practitioners at Sick Children.  I've taken my own kids there - they're the best.

Today I talked to a friend of mine who is profoundly deaf but, through assistive technology, is able to hear, speak and contribute her maximum potential to society.  Like Aaliyah, though, there's a great deal of personal bravery to this story, too.  My friend was sexually abused during her student years - she was the deaf kid, so an easy target.  She faces daily the stigma of a hearing world that sees her as abnormal.  If you doubt that, then answer this - would you want a profoundly deaf woman to be the mother of your grandkids?

Someone I haven't been able to reach recently is another young woman, a friend with co-morbid mental health conditions, including Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder and Depression.  I wonder how many people are proactively trying to reach out to her - and if her feelings of perpetual loneliness are simply being reinforced by the cone of stigma she lives within in a world that shuns the abnormal.

These are three individuals who know what their restrictions are and have, at least to some degree, access to supports that help them function as normal people.  Still, it's tough.  What about the countless sufferers of chronic pain, physical impairment that's just not quite obvious or worse, a mental illness that gets interpreted by most as behaviour issues?

“Over 4.6 million Canadians live with arthritis. But how many would guess that so many of those are under the age of 16, or that arthritis is among the most common of childhood chronic conditions,” Arthritis Society president Janet Yale said.

People are busy.  They don't have time for things that aren't essential.  The more important people are, the busier they get - and the more aggressive they need to be to get through their day, achieving whatever goals they have set out.  If you can't help them, you're either irrelevant or a hindrance.

The kid who won't play certain sports in class because they say it's ouchy?  They're the class-problem. 

The exasperating employee who's always stuttering or avoiding their manager?  Can 'em, they have no value.

The senior who's not quite all there?  Well, that's a sales opportunity waiting to happen.  It's a tough world, the strong survive and besides, if you don't hook the sale first, someone else will.  Some people, after all, are just marks.

Like my deaf friend who, funny enough, now works in HR.  A generation previous - and in most places, in her generation - she'd have never been seen as more than a target or a failed person.  With some technology and support, she's now making an organization work better.  Like I said, funny.

We are, each of us, flawed human beings - the would-be prey and predator both.  These inclusions of the body and mind give us each different challenges, differing opportunities that can never be fully mastered individually.  Why, even the predator is fruitless in the absence of prey. 

When we're transparent, though, we can reflect together and become conduits for a light the likes none of us can produce individually.  The telephone was created as an accommodation for deafness - now, we all benefit.  Challenges create opportunity that innovation solves and a good marketing mind will sell.  As for the disability itself - if you're too busy to delve deeper than an easy label, you never know what you could be missing.

Remember, though, that the reverse will also be true.