Last year, two Los Angeles women, ages 31 and 48, visited Cedars-Sinai Hospital on separate occasions suffering from a mysterious and debilitating illness.
They were struck by the classic symptoms of vertigo: a condition that causes constant dizziness and the feeling of participating in a never-ending carnival.
The majority of patients also experience nausea, making it difficult to even get out of bed.
There was no obvious cause in either case, as both women were relatively young and healthy.
Doctors were perplexed, until they discovered that the patients shared a daily habit: using a battery-powered massager, such as a Theragun, to relieve shoulder and neck pain.
When doctors asked the women to stop their massage routine, their condition was cured almost immediately.
These two cases led Dr. Ronen Nazarian, an otolaryngologist at Cedars-Sinai, and doctoral student David Elisha, to conclude that using devices like Theragun on the shoulders and neck can cause people to develop disease. rare called benign paroxysmal positional vertigo (BPPV).
They explain that the intense vibrations emitted by the device can, in rare cases, disrupt the ear’s complex balance mechanism.
Now, they want users to be warned that using this wellness device could make you sick.
“Manufacturers should issue widespread warnings about the risks of dizziness associated with these devices, particularly when used near the head and upper neck,” they wrote in their case report, published in JAMA Otolaryngology Head Neck Surgery.
Theragun is by no means the only brand of this type of massager, but it is by far the most popular brand in the United States, accounting for 71% of the market in 2021.
The original Theragun sells for $149 online. Other retailers, like HyperVolt and RecoverFun, sell their massage guns for $199 and $99, respectively.
These massagers are sold to provide a concentrated deep tissue massage to relieve sore muscles.
Devices are used to relieve tension on the neck, shoulders and even the base of the skull.
BPPV is a relatively rare disease. About 3.2% of people develop them each year, the authors write.
This happens when the organs that control balance, located in your inner ear, are disrupted. This set of organs, called the vestibular system, looks a bit like a pair of snails.
A number of factors can disrupt the inner ear, including infections, strokes, and medications. But most cases of this type of vertigo are caused by head trauma, such as a concussion, a fall, or an assault.
The disruption causes your body to lose its sense of balance and develop dizziness, unsteadiness, nausea, dizziness, vomiting and difficulty moving as a result.
It makes you feel like you’re “in a carnival,” an unidentified dizziness sufferer said in a 2020 case report.
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But as the study shows, intense and frequent vibrations also cause dizziness.
Dr. Nazarian suggests in his article that vibration-induced dizziness may be underestimated and that even the use of electric toothbrushes may be enough to trigger this condition.
Although this may seem far-fetched, other medical experts agree.
Cycling over rough terrain and doing intense aerobic exercise have also caused cases of dizziness, according to Johns Hopkins Medical School.
This mechanism could be implemented with massage guns, which stimulate the body between 1,700 and 5,000 times per minute, representing between 31 and 70 pounds of force.
That amount of force could cause the tiny elements that control our balance in the inner ear to jostle, the authors say, causing dizziness.
News Source : www.dailymail.co.uk
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