Doctors warn that text neck can cause serious damage to teenagers

A new physical ailment is affecting the tech-savvy generation. Some youngsters are spending as much as 5,000 hours a year reading their cellphones, leading to chronic pain known as "text neck" and doctors say it could cause serious damage." Sarah Atchison texts with the best of them, but looking down at her smart phone, often for hours at a time, left the 14-year-old with a pain in her neck.

"It was mostly just achy. And it made it really hard to concentrate,” Sarah said. Dr Chad Cotter, of HealthSource Chiropractic in Littleton, Colorado, who says his patients are getting younger and younger, said: "Text neck is where the proper curve in the cervical spine actually gets reduced and can even move forward”. A good curve is ideally 40 degree but Sarah's x-rays showed a different story.
"This should be shaped like the red line. But this girl has lost that neck curve and it has moved to a classic reverse curve or text neck,” Cotter said. Cotter is helping Sarah reverse damage that used to take decades to develop. "Tension across the shoulders, generalised neck pain, migraines. It can even be numbness and tingling down the arms that we're seeing in high schoolers,” he said. “It's alarming. It's setting those kids up to have major problems as adults.

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"Kids don't know how to explain it to their parents. They don't know how to express it correctly. And so parents discount what their kids are saying until it becomes a big problem." Using head-weights, shoulder exercises, resistance bands and re-adjustments, Dr Cotter, and his team are working to strengthen Sarah's neck and back muscles and he said the treatments, if done properly, can quickly counteract the symptoms of smart phone use and alleviate texting tension.