Oh dear, textaholic seeks iPhone for carpal tunnel relief
Note: The medical opinions expressed in this post are anecdotal in nature and represent the non-professional experiences of one blogger. It's true that some people have had success with trigger point therapy. However, it is our recommendation that Ms. Levitz and any person suffering with carpal tunnel or a repetitive stress injury should follow the advice of his/her physician or other certified medical professional.
File this under "what did you expect?" Annie Levitz, a sixteen year old from Mundelein, IL has been sending 4,000 text messages a month. Yes, FOUR THOUSAND. She began to feel tingling, pain and numbness in her hands and went to her doctor who diagnosed her the the RSI injury, carpal tunnel syndrome. She's had cortisone injections and will need surgery. But Annie thinks there's another solution -- switching to an iPhone. "I do think that since it's touch it won't be as rough on my hands," she said.
Annie, I could make fun of your situation, but I'm not going to because neuropathic pain sucks. Matter of fact, maybe I can help a bunch of our readers out who are in similar situations.
Annie: you especially, and most likely your doctor, are wrong about the solutions to your problem. "Carpal tunnel syndrome" is more often than not a description of the symptoms than a diagnosis of the actual problem. The cure is not an iPhone, cortisone injections, or God forbid, surgery. It's trigger point therapy. How do I know? Because for two years I had crippling back pain. It was so bad I couldn't walk without excruciating pain. I went to the best doctors and physical therapists who did little to relieve my symptoms. Most doctors said they couldn't pinpoint what was wrong but "knew" I needed injections or surgery to fix it. By chance I read about trigger points online and ordered a book about them. It was the best purchase I've made in my entire life. In less than half an hour, I ended my excruciating back pain -- pain I lived with for two years! -- on my own with a tennis ball.
Since then I have been diagnosed with carpel tunnel, plantar fasciitis and a bad knee. I have successfully treated all -- without doctors -- using trigger point therapy. Usually it only takes two days of about 10 to 20 minutes of self-applied trigger point therapy to take care of these "medical conditions."
Now God knows I'm not a doctor. I'm just a normal guy who used to know nothing about anatomy or physiology that took his own health into his own hands -- and it worked. Since then I've helped many people help themselves through trigger point therapy. BTW, trigger point therapy is not acupuncture or some type of "quack medicine." Trigger point therapy relies on physiological science and an exemplary understanding about origins and insertions of muscle, fascia, and tendons. Trigger points are scientifically proven and can be easily viewed under an electron microscope. The therapy was pioneered by Dr Janet Travell, the personal physician to John F. Kennedy.
Most likely, based on my personal experience, the pain you are feeling in your hands is coming from the scalene muscles in your neck. This makes sense if you think of how you hold your device while texting. Your upper body is usually shrugged which causes trigger points to form which in turn puts pressure on nerves that run from your neck to your hands where you are feeling the pain.
Trigger point therapy has been around for over forty years and is only now gaining traction in the medical community. If more people knew about it, computer user's RSI "injuries" could be effectively prevented, treated, and cured. So Annie please, before you get surgery, check out trigger point therapy. It's worth a try, isn't it? Within days you'll know if its worked for you. There's even a trigger point app in the App Store you can use to guide you if you do get that new iPhone. If it doesn't work, you can still have the invasive surgery.
One last thing, stop sending so many texts -- you don't want to be like this guy.
