'WhatsAppitis' Is Now a Bona Fide Disease

People can’t do anything these days without getting hurt doing it—for every activity, there seems to be a corresponding injury that seems to go with it. Take, for instance, the recent case of a woman diagnosed with the first-ever case of “WhatsAppitis.”

The patient, a 34-year-old doctor, ironically enough, spent six hours on Christmas Eve sending WhatsApp messages to her friends and family. During that time, “she made continuous movements with both thumbs to send messages,” according to a report in The Lancet, one of the most well-respected medical journals in the world.

She woke up the next morning with pain in both wrists, which was diagnosed by a doctor as WhatsAppitis. She was given Tylenol and told to lay off the phone, a recommendation which she did NOT take, as the report notes that she “did not completely abstain from using her phone, with exchange of new messages on December 31.”

Do anything too much and you’ll get sore, and that’s apparently what happened. It’s not the first time someone has hurt themselves by texting too much; a 2012 National Institutes of Health study noted that when texting, “the thumb most of the time adducted on the key pad of the mobile and use high force to type the letters. Studies in literature showed that text messaging has an adverse effect on musculoskeletal system of hand.”

People who text too much are at higher risk of wrist tendonitis, myofascial pain syndrome, and even hypothyroidism, according to that NIH study. It’s not even the first time that a doctor has gotten cheeky with a diagnosis. “Affluenza” aside, a doctor once described “Nintendinitis” to a patient who injured themselves while playing Game Boy in 1990.

I could warn you all day about how you need to be careful when you’re tapping out emojis, but why listen to me? Let’s let The Lancet, which has been in existence since 1823 and has published some of the most important medical research of all time, take it away from here:

“A so-called Nintendinitis was first described in 1990, and since then several injuries associated with video games and new technologies have been reported. Initially reported in children, such cases are now seen in adults. Tenosynovitis caused by texting with mobile phones could well be an emerging disease. Physicians need to be mindful of these new disorders.”

And you need to be mindful of it, too. No word on if Facebook wants its money back after learning of this deeply disturbing illness.