If You’re a Narcissist You Might Have This Truly Embarrassing Injury

Impact

Technology may be giving you a sports injury — if you consider smoldering into your front-facing camera a sport. 

When Today Show anchor Hoda Kotb went to the orthopedist for an achy elbow, she learned that she may be suffering from "Selfie Elbow," Elle reported. 

Goddamnit, we now have a medical reason to invest in selfie sticks. 

"Basically, the interface between technology and the human body sometimes causes injuries of over-exuberance," Dr. Jordan Metzl, a sports medicine physician at New York's Hospital for Special Surgery, told Elle

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 i just off the bone and you get this inflammatory response.

And we take a hell of a lot of selfies. Google said in 2014 that Android users were taking 93 million selfies. A day. On Instagram, there are over 257 million posts tagged with #selfie

If you think you may be suffering from Selfie Elbow, Metzl told Elle that you can pop an Advil or Motrin, put some ice on it and stretch.

Or hey, maybe evolution will grant us iron-strong elbow joints for endless streams of painless selfies. 

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