Treo Thumb, it's all a load of.....

There has been a lot of talk on the Palm Addicts Forum today, especially regarding the new phenomena known as “Treo Thumb”, and it has proved to be interesting and also very informative to gauge people’s opinions on this topic. If you take a negatively slanted approach I suppose you could say that it is inevitable that some form of physical injury with regard to the use of mobile devices would rear it’s head at some point, as to some degree this same viewpoint would I’m sure also include the very descriptive and insightful phrase hypochondriac!

Now my opinion on this view would be that it is too one sided, and you cannot simply sweep this topic and all its parts under the heading of hypochondria, I simply do not believe that it is as clear cut as that. There are many factors which you ought to take into consideration before casting your opinion on this.

I think that there is an element of playing this phenomenon a bit too much, because it is not something that would be recognised or is a major concern in a widespread context. However you cannot deny that there is something underlying of important concern to any users of mobile devices. For years and years there has been so much research and development which has been ploughed into finding out the effects of using mobile communication devices on your mental health and weather they emit radiation at a level which can harm your brain. There has been so much published research which fails to prove either way whether there is or isn’t an effect; however it does appear to gradually lean more to the latter.

But ask yourself this question. Just off the top of your head, can you recall any research which has gone into the possible physical damage to your hands and fingers from using our handheld devices? I personally cannot think of anything, and to be honest it is quite surprising that this area hasn’t been looked into. In order to understand this problem I believe you first need to look at the society we have become.

Let’s just take texting for example. So many people text each other instead of calling and it seems to have become the norm for huge sections of our society! Books have been published as the Dictionaries of “text language” and it has gradually become a cultural and social pointer. I can include myself in this category, if I can text someone instead of calling them than it is exactly what I will do. Don’t get me wrong I don’t solely text people, I will make a phone call on many occasions too, but there are many situations when a quick or short text is much more ideal and efficient. Despite there being text speak in existence (something which I only half use) there is still a lot of typing (on a small keyboard) which takes place when you tot up all the texts sent in say just one week – this alone makes up a large quantity of usage. When you add to texting writing word documents and sending emails which take place very often on a Palm device of course the quantity is again upped. This is without taking into account games. I’ve written an editorial before about games and how they seem to have become a big industry in the world of mobile technology; and as such so many of us out there have games on our devices, and they aren’t all stylus/touch screen controlled – so using the buttons for these games is also another usage which takes its toll on your fingers!

It can be said that if such injuries do occur from this “over usage” that it is our own fault for using our devices as primary email and document systems rather than our desktop computers. However it is not quite as easy as this; because in our modern and ever increasingly busy lives we often are not able to afford time to sit at our desk, and quite often many of us do not even have a desk as we are on the move, so in essence we are “forced” to use our mobile devices. This argument could be countered by saying that we should simply not use our devices; however this conjecture is a lot easier in theory than in practice!

I don’t think that “Treo Thumb” is quite yet ready to be quoted in the same sentence as athlete’s foot or tennis elbow, but it is a factor we should not ignore, we should take note of it as it may effect or more than we care to realise, for example the possibilities of getting arthritis at a young age.