Excessive SMS Causes Injury

The action of writing a text message if carried out very frequently and without considering potential repetitive strain on the joints, can lead to pain or discomfort in the thumb and fingers. With texting continuing to increase in popularity, there has been a significant growth in reported cases of Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI ) occurring in the thumbs of Britain’s texters.

With over 12 percent of the population admitting to sending up to 20 texts per day, and 10 percent even admitting to sending up to 100 texts every single day it is not surprising that people are using their thumbs more than ever and suffering from sore finger and wrist joints as a result.

With text messaging on the increase, it is set to remain a popular form of communication for a long time to come. With this increased stress on our fingers and thumbs, Text Message Injury is likely to become more commonplace, unless users take precautions. When text messaging, the tendency is to keep your shoulders and upper arms tense. This cuts down the circulation to the forearm, when in fact it needs a greater than normal blood flow to achieve the consistent movements of the thumbs and fingers.

Other statistics reveal that over 4 million people suffer from either numb thumbs, a sore thumb or an achey wrist joint at some point from texting, with over 5 million revealing they have had to stop texting due to discomfort in their thumbs.

These figures look to increase as it is forecast that texting will continue to rise this year to deliver an annual total of 36.5 billion text messages for 2006 in the UK alone, with an average of 3 billion messages being sent per month and 100 million per day; compared with an estimated 82 million per day in 2005, 68.5 million in 2004, and 56.2 million in 2003.