14-Year-Old Colo. Girl Gets Diagnosed with ‘Text Neck’

The parents of a 14-year-old girl were stunned to learn that their daughter developed a medical condition that results from looking down at her phone constantly.

“I always look down at my phone,” Sarah Atchinson said after a checkup in Littleton, Colo.

She added: “It was mostly just achy and it made it really hard to concentrate.”

The condition, which some have dubbed “text neck,” takes place when the cervical spine gets reduced and moves off track. It apparently can take place when people spend hours looking down at their handheld devices.

According to the ABC report, some kids are spending thousands of hours per year looking at their phones.

“Tension across the shoulders, generalized neck pain, migraines. It can even be numbness and tingling down the arms that we’re seeing in high-schoolers. It’s alarming. It’s setting those kids up to have major problems as adults,” Dr. Chad Cotter with HealthSource Chiropractic in Littleton. said. He added that head-weights, shoulder exercises, resistance bands, and other forms of therapy can counter the problems.

And it’s a growing problem.

As Dr. Dean Fishman, who opened up the Text Neck Institute, has told the New York Daily News: “Nobody realized how severe it was until I put the name ’text neck' on it.”