What is Acute Wiiitis?
The term “wiiitis” was coined by Dr. Julio Bonis, a medical resident, after waking up one Sunday morning with intense pain in the right shoulder. He did not recall any recent injuries or trauma and had not participated in any sports or physical exercise recently. When he consulted a rheumatologist and the Patte’s test was positive, consistent with acute tendonitis isolated to the right infraspinatus.
Then he recalled his activities for the previous 24 hours and remembered that he had bought a new Nintendo Wii (pronounced “wee”) video-game system and had spent several hours playing the tennis video game.
With the Wii system, the player faces a video screen and moves a handheld controller (approximately 14.5 cm by 3.0 cm by 3.0 cm, with a weight of approximately 200 g) containing solid-state accelerometers and gyroscopes that sense three-dimensional spatial movements. In the tennis video game, the player makes the same arm movements as in a real game of tennis. If a player gets too engrossed, he may “play tennis” on the video screen for many hours. Unlike in the real sport, physical strength and endurance are not limiting factors. New England Journal of Medicine
“Wiiitis” (pronounced “wee-eye-tis”) is the latest ailment to develop from the video game era, beginning with Space Invaders’ wrist in 1981, which was caused by the repeated button mashing required by the popular arcade game. It is a variant of Nintendinitis, a disease entity which first recognized last 1990 after a Wisconsin doctor characterized the thumb soreness brought on by pushing the buttons on a controller as “Nintendinitis” after it affected a 35-year-old woman who played a Nintendo game without interruption for five hours.
The treatment consisted of ibuprofen for one week, as well as complete abstinence from playing Wii video games. The patient recovered fully.
But with the current addiction of people to Nintendo game, it is almost always impossible to abstain them from playing. Just use it moderately.
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