Kim Kardashian better take good care of her elbows.
The queen of selfies could be at risk for the repetitive strain injury, dubbed “selfie elbow,” that doctors say they are noticing more frequently.
Yes, selfie elbow is a real condition. It’s a simple overuse injury caused by extending and twisting your arm for one too many phone selfies.
Cellphones have already been blamed for plenty of ailments, from “tech neck,” to Blackberry thumb or text claw. But doctors say there’s something about taking selfies that causes a unique injury.
Selfie elbow is really a kind of tendinitis, similar to tennis elbow, says chiropractor and injury specialist Marco De Ciantis, the co-owner of Sports Specialist Rehab Centre in Toronto,
“It’s not the phone that will actually be the problem – the weight of it is negligible,” he told CTV News Channel.
“But holding it up, or twisting your wrist -- it’s the contorted positions you put your elbow and wrist in is how you’d get this condition.”
Taking a few self-portraits while on summer vacation won’t bring on the pain, but for phone addicts who spend hours every week taking selfies, all that elbow and wrist contortion adds up and could cause pain.
While some might think the solution is a selfie stick to do more of the extending, De Ciantis isn’t sure that will do much.
“Holding the stick far from you just causes your wrist and elbow to act as a fulcrum, so they become stress points. And that just tends to add up and add up,” he says.
The cure for selfie elbow?
It’s essentially the same as the standard treatment for tennis elbow. De Ciantis says can mean “soft tissue release” techniques of massage and stretching. Ice and heat therapy can also help.
But really, the cure for selfie elbow is simply taking fewer selfies.
“The big thing is to mitigate the mechanism of injury, which is taking those selfies. So if we can lower the amount of a time they do them a week, it will be self-limiting and take care of itself,” said De Ciantis.
So instead of taking shot after shot from different angles, just snap a pic or two. And of course, there’s always going back to the old-fashioned way of getting a great pic of yourself: ask someone else to take it for you.
