Capturing the perfect selfie can be a real pain in the elbow. Seriously.
It's time to add "selfie elbow" to the growing list of problems your social media addiction is causing. Like tennis elbow or golfer's elbow—minus, you know, any actual exercise—a dedication to selfie-taking is landing people in the doctor's office.
Take Hoda Kotb, the award-winning journalist and co-anchor of the fourth hour of NBC's Today. Kotb's selfie love is well documented on Instagram—her 1,000-watt smile on display in selfies with everyone from her mom and her boyfriend to Luke Bryan, Blake Shelton, and LL Cool J to a group of volleyball players from Long Island she met at the airport. There's no denying that Kotb doesn't just love selfies—she's mastered the perfect angle at which to take them, too (chin down, camera above the head, teeth showing in every shot). Turns out that beauty really is pain, because recently on Today she complained of an achy elbow.
"I went to the orthopedist and he said, 'Are you playing tennis or ping-pong?' And of course I'm not, so I told him I was taking selfies," she tells ELLE.com, adding that her doctor recommended icing her elbow and doing certain exercises to help with the soreness. "When you take the picture, your arm is up, bent in a weird way and you just click, click, click—think about how many you take: 20, 30, or 40. Selfie elbow, everyone has it!" she says, laughing.
According to Dr. Jordan Metzl, a sports medicine physician at New York's Hospital for Special Surgery, the problem is simply overuse. If you do something enough times—typing, texting, taking selfies—it's going to have consequences. And like carpal tunnel and tendinitis, it's the repetitive nature of the task that causes the aches.
"Basically, the interface between technology and the human body sometimes causes injuries of over-exuberance," Dr. Metzl, who admits he's never taken a selfie, says. "What that means is you do something, you do it a lot, then stuff starts to hurt. We used to see it with Blackberry phones—it was a real thing. People would get tendinitis in their thumb because they were on their Blackberries all the time. You get tennis elbow from playing too much tennis—or having poor form—and you get selfie elbow from taking too many selfies. You put too much stress on the muscle and it irritates the area where the muscle comes off the bone and you get this inflammatory response."
The treatment plan is simple—Advil or Motrin for the inflammation, some ice and stretching. He also advises switching it up and balancing the burden.
"Maybe people should alternate their arms—start spreading the load," he says. "Or maybe they can start stretching before they take selfies, so they can warm up their muscles so they don't get so sore up there," he jokes.
There's concern, too, about the increase in tech injuries in teens. From gaming and Snapchatting to selfie-taking, texting and tweeting, tweens and teens are more prone to overuse injuries than ever before.
"I'm hearing particularly about tech injuries in younger kids. In recent years we've been seeing an increase in carpal tunnel syndrome and tendinitis from overuse in teens, where 10 to 15 years ago it was mostly scraped knees and falling off a bike," says Dr. Charles Kim, a musculoskeletal rehab specialist at Rusk Rehabilitation at NYU Langone Medical Center. "We are actually seeing a lot more distress injuries in younger patients because of the way they use technology."
Dr. Kim suggests a selfie stick for the dedicated documenters—the stick works like an arm extender and takes the pressure off the elbow. Or the old-fashioned way, i.e. getting someone else to snap the picture for you. He also insists that people listen to their bodies—if something hurts, ice it and give it some rest because no photo is worth the pain.
As for Kotb, she's got no plans to stop snapping selfies, although she's working on a new technique.
"I'm not going to stop taking selfies! But now I prop it with my left arm to help alleviate some of the pressure," she says. "When my elbow is ultra-sore, I ask someone else to take the selfie. When it starts to feel better, I start taking them again!"
