Hardly a week goes by without gaming being blamed for bad health, mostly recently an outbreak of Rickits in Newcastle but this is nothing new. It’s ‘time’ to pop in Sainsburys Be Good To Yourself Lasagne in the TSA Time Microwave and head back to 2004..
Hello, its 2004! This year prestigious medical journal, The Lancet, detailed a new health hazard, ‘Playstation Thumb’. Excessive use of Playstation controllers resulted in a blister, fatigue of the thumb and tendon pain. This has lead to a raft of research and documents including “The Use of Dermoscopy to Visualize Punctuate Haemorrhages and Onycholysis in “Playstation Thumb”.
2009 saw the sequel to Playstation Thumb – Playstation Palm, or PlayStation Palmar Hidradenitis to give it it’s full medical name. According to the British Journal of Dermatology, a young girl suffered red lumps and sore patches on her hands due to furious gaming.
Back to the year 2000 and the Playstation is once more blamed in the great “Playstation Lip” scandal. The British Medical Journal published two dentist’s experiences with children who had suffered trauma due to game playing;
Sir, – It has come to our attention that an unusual consequence of children concentrating whilst playing their computer games of PlayStation games appears to be that of trauma to the lower lips.
We have recently seen two children who have attended Newcastle Dental Hospital children’s department with severe trauma to their lower lips. On questioning it was clear that this trauma had occurred whilst playing on their PlayStations and consequently we found it necessary to provide them with lower soft splints to prevent any further damage.
Improbable Research also documents a letter from (and I’m not making this up) ‘Anguished mother and dentist Agnes Twombley’;
I am an anguished mother and a dentist. Please help me alert the public to a nearly omnipresent modern danger. If you are a parent, for God’s sake get yourself a copy of the report: “PlayStation Lip,” R.L. Inglis and R.R. Welbury, British Dental Journal, vol. 188, no. 11, June 10, 2000.”  God bless our children and keep them safe from video game lip and or other faciocranial hazards.
More recently an Italian boy was rushed to hospital suffering from what appeared to be a stroke or severe brain disorder. Disorientated and unable to speak the doctors were baffled until they discovered he had just completed a marathon Playstation session. Local politician Antonio Buccoliero, who spoke to the doctors, said: “They eventually managed to take care of him once they understood that this was a strange kind of mental detachment connected to his Playstation.” The boy asked his dad to throw away his console saying, ‘If I even think about it I want to throw up.’
June 2007 introduced the world to Wii-itis when Dr. Julio Bonis awoke on a Sunday morning and discovered he had a sore shoulder. He had been playing Wii Tennis the night before but it was not Tennis Elbow; “The variant in this patient can be labelled more specifically as ‘Wiiitis,'” Bonis, a family practice physician, wrote in a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine, “The treatment consisted of ibuprofen for one week, as well as complete abstinence from playing Wii video games. The patient recovered fully.”
Strangely, the one medical condition that gets the most coverage does not officially exist. Video Game addiction is not listed in either the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems.