How much damage are smart phones, computers and tablets doing to our bodies?

Last week the media was briefly focused on the external occipital protuberance, a fancy name for a bony bump at the back of the head. This fascination centered on whether or not the bump was more common in millenials and Gen Zers as a bony compensation for neck muscle strain from excess screen time. The answer is not known, but the more important question was obscure. How much damage are smart phones, computers, iPads and video games doing to our bodies? 

The complete answer isn’t in yet, more research needs to be done. But “text neck” is real — it is an overuse syndrome of neck pain and headaches linked to leaning forward when you look at screensl and text neck is just one problem. Excess screen time may also lead to vision problems, and excess video game use has been connected to wrist pain (carpal tunnel syndrome). There is also some evidence that anxiety, depression can result from too much time spent on social media.  

Times have certainly changed in a hurry. When I attended Brown University in the late 1970s,  we didn’t have cell phones or even personal computers. Our typewriters and notepads were sufficient and we never felt that we lacked any learning tools. 

In the fall, my daughter will attend Brown as a freshman, and when I asked her about making the east side of Providence her second home as I had done, she replied that in these days of smart phones and social media, home is an outdated concept, that you can be nowhere and everywhere at the same time.

I am not worried about my daughter. She appears to be quite capable of interweaving her personal world with the technological one. She lives on-line and off-line at the same time, but I hope she is wrong about home being an outdated concept. 

Too many young people of Generation Z are trapped inside their personal technology universes. Snapchat and Instagram and Facebook are intended as communication tools with friends, not as replacements for them. Online or social media “friends” we have never met are two dimensional. Our knowledge of them is necessarily limited. Believing they are true friends can be dangerous.

In fact a new German study published in “Psychiatric Research” reveals that Facebook addiction quickly develops during periods of stress when users don’t have a well developed support system offline. 

And multiple studies have shown a relationship between excess smartphone use and a negative impact on psychological health as a smartphone interferes with attention, relationships and sleep.   

To be sure, more research needs to be done. A study just released for Lancaster University in the UK points out that most studies on the impact of technology especially smart phones on psychological wellbeing are necessarily flawed because they rely too much on inaccurate self reporting. 

In the meantime, I am concerned about the direction our culture is taking. I hope that enough of the “old world” remains so that this Fall, my daughter will come to call Providence her second home. And if she goes to my favorite sandwich shop Geoff’s for a study break, she will bring her friends there with her rather than texting them or tweeting people she has never met.

Marc Siegel M.D. is a professor of medicine and medical director at Doctor Radio at NYU Langone Health. He is a Fox News Medical Correspondent. Follow him on Twitter: @drmarcsiegel.