Archive for the 'Wiiitis' Category

Wiiitis

Reuters put a story out on Wiiitis - also known as Wii Elbow. Here’s an excerpt:

BOSTON (Reuters) - When Dr. Julio Bonis awoke one Sunday morning with a sore shoulder, he could not figure out what he had done. It felt like a sports injury, but he had been a bit of a couch potato lately.

Then he remembered his new Wii.

Bonis, 29, had spent hours playing Nintendo’s new video game in which players simulate real movements. Bonis had been playing simulated tennis.

It was not quite tennis elbow, he decided.

“The variant in this patient can be labelled more specifically as ‘Wiiitis,’” Bonis, a family practice physician, wrote in a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine.

“The treatment consisted of ibuprofen for one week, as well as complete abstinence from playing Wii video games. The patient recovered fully.”

Wiiitis — pronounced “wee-eye-tis” — is the latest ailment to develop from the video game era, beginning with Space Invaders’ wrist in 1981, which was caused by the repeated button mashing required by the popular arcade game.

Reaction to the article has been varied - there is a lot of denial in reader comments on the engadget take, and technorati has 562 links to posts with this tag so far. Interesting - we’ll see whether the world comes to accept Wiiitis as a legitimate condition as more research comes to light.