Do you know of someone who simply cannot be left apart from his or her smartphone, even for a minute? Not only that, the main app that this particular contact of yours happens to be WhatsApp, so much so that you’re sick and tired of hearing the incoming message alert of WhatsApp. Well, that particular person could actually be suffering from a disease known as “WhatsAppitis”. We’re not making this up for sure, as The Lancet, one of the most well respected medical journals in the world, has reported on the diagnosis of this disease.
People can’t do anything these days without getting hurt doing it—for every activity, there seems to be a corresponding injury that seems to go with it. Take, for instance, the recent case of a woman diagnosed with the first-ever case of “WhatsAppitis.” The patient, a 34-year-old doctor, ironically enough, spent six hours on Christmas Eve sending WhatsApp messages to her friends and family. During that time, “she made continuous movements with both thumbs to send messages,” according to a report in The Lancet, one of the most well-respected medical journals in the world. She woke up the next morning with pain in both wrists, which was diagnosed by a doctor as WhatsAppitis. She was given Tylenol and told to lay off the phone, a recommendation which she did NOT take, as the report notes that she “did not completely abstain from using her phone, with exchange of new messages on December 31.”
