Hands-free won’t hurt

Using your smartphone for more than half-an-hour at a time could be detrimental to your hands, says one doctor. Dr Lucia Heras-Garcia of Medcare Hospital in Dubai says messaging away on your BlackBerry or iPhone could lead to tenosynovitis, a condition where inflammation occurs near the tendons in your hands, which leads to pain, swelling and restricts your hand movements. “This life we live in now with all this technology, we are using our hands for a lot more things than we used to,” Heras-Garcia said. “I see a lot more tenosynovitis cases here in the UAE because lots of people are on their BlackBerries,” she said. Her warning comes as Medcare Hospital announced it would launch the first private hospital specifically dedicated to the treatment of orthopaedic injuries by the end of this month. In addition to using smartphones, inflammation of the hands can also be caused by other repetitive movements such as playing videogames using handheld controllers. As the only hand surgeon in the country, Heras-Garcia says most of the people who come to her do so as a last resort. “Surgery is the last thing to do, around 80 per cent of tenosynovitis cases are solved without surgery,” she said. Most of her patients are either teenagers or people aged 40 or older, Heras-Garcia said. But she noted there is one thing that’s common among most of them. “Every time I ask if they have a BlackBerry, in 90 per cent of the cases, they do.” Abdullah Dali, an avid BlackBerry user, says the danger of overusing his phone doesn’t bother him. “I don’t believe that this (tenosynovitis) would happen to me because people have been using smartphones for many years now and I haven’t seen any of my friends who use smartphones suffering from this,” Dali said. The 24-year-old student says he believes a bigger danger is using the BlackBerry Messenger service or text messaging while driving. But Iwona Kopiczko, 41, says younger people should be more aware of not abusing their hands. Kopiczko underwent surgery in her right wrist after typing at her desk, text-messaging friends and browsing the Internet on her iPhone. Her wrists failed her when she tried to lift a six-year-old child, at which point surgery was her only option. “Trying to open a jar or opening a door was difficult,” Kopiczko said. After the surgery in February, Kopiczko said her wrist is doing much better, but added that she has changed the way she treats her hands. “I respect my wrists and hands more, I don’t abuse them any more,” Kopiczko said, noting that she takes breaks if she’s on the computer typing at work or messaging people on her smartphone She also underwent physiotherapy after surgery to get her wrist working again. After wrist surgery, patients usually undergo 10 to 20 sessions of therapy over a two to three month period, said Kusum Moti Jham, the head of the physiotherapy department at Medcare Hospital. The therapy is based on a case-by-case basis and the goal is to make the patient’s hands as functional as they were before the injury, Jham said. The session involves stretching of the hands and resistance training using items like Plasticine. Jham said she also treats other ailments of the hand including carpal-tunnel syndrome, a condition that leads to numbness, weakness, or muscle damage in the hand and fingers. It is usually caused by repetitive movements of the hand, such as typing or using the messenger service on your smartphone. Patients suffering from carpal tunnel usually have eight to 10 sessions of therapy that involve therapeutic ultrasounds, which stimulates the tissue beneath the skin. Kopiczko said it’s a relatively long process to heal from an injury that can be avoided in the first place. She advises people to be careful when using their smartphones. “We often abuse our hands and wrist, so give your phone a break and relax. “There’s more to life than your phone.”