I am so grateful that that I have never owned a cellphone, what with all the adverse and scary warnings abounding out there.
We all understand that mobile technology has transformed the way we live, whether it is reading, working or communicating (hardly face-to-face anymore). Even some of the millennials or lonely seniors for expediency, search for a match from a dating website on-line rather than the old fashioned way of simply asking to go on a date.
Most people feel quirky about cellphones. On the one hand, they can’t live without them. On the other, they are terrified that the technological risks that they don’t comprehend are scarier than hell.
These tiny machines we stare at for hours is possibly altering not just our behaviors but our bodies. New research in biomechanics suggests that young people are developing hornlike spikes at the back of their skulls. These bone spurs caused by the forward tilt of the head shifts weight from the spine to the muscles at the back of the head. Thus, this unnatural position is causing bone growth in the connecting tendons and ligaments, such as the way the skin thickens into a callus as a response to pressure.
A pair of researchers at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia, argues that the prevalence of the bone growth is more so in younger adults. These researchers said this marks the first physical adaption of advanced technology into everyday life.
Although I don’t use a cell phone per se, I am often near others who do. I repeat the standard test often, of running my hand down the back of my head and over my neck to feel for new growths. There is one bump that has always been there, the one my mother told me was “A sign of intelligence.” I believe one of my sisters has one also. As for my friends, I get them to do the test whenever I can convince them. Curiously, no one yet has developed these horn-like growths in our ‘neck’ of the woods. We figure that cell service in Whitewater Region is so intermittent or unavailable most times, that is what is saving us from the horn protuberance.
David Shahar, a chiropractor who recently completed a PhD in biomechanics at Sunshine Coast told The Washington Post. “You may say it looks like a bird’s beak, a horn, a hook but whatever you call it, this formation is a sign of a serious deformity in one’s posture that can cause chronic headaches and pain in the upper back and neck. Part of what was striking about the findings, he said, was the size of the bone spurs, measuring 10 millimetres or about two-fifths of an inch.
There are always skeptics of course. Michael Nitabach, a professor of physiology, genetics and neuroscience at Yale University, was unconvinced by the findings. “Without knowing about the cellphone use of any of the people whose head X-rays were analyzed, it is impossible to draw conclusions about correlation between cellphone use and skull morphology,” he said.
Mark Sayers, an associate professor at Sunshine Coast served as Shahar’s supervisor and co-authored the pair’s first paper, published in the Journal of Anatomy in 2016. They had enlisted a sample of 218 x-rays of subjects, ages 18 to 30, to suggest that the bone growth could be observed in 41 percent of young adults, much more than previously thought. The feature was more prevalent among men than among women.
That the bone growth develops over a long period of time suggests that sustained improvement in posture can stop it short and even ward off its associated effects, the authors say. Sayers said the answer is not necessarily swearing off technology but, “What we need are coping mechanisms that reflect how important technology has become in our lives.”
Even as threatening according to Environmental Health Trust is ‘cellphone radiation’ from wearing a cellphone in a pocket or on a belt that leads to male reproductive problems and possible impotence. Another threat, along with global warming, that could cause extinction of the human race.
I don’t know what to think about all this horrific ‘phone bone’ phenomena except that I don’t like hanging around with too many cellphone horny friends at the same time.
