Top 10 Video Game Injuries

01. Tearing the Thumb Tendon playing Candy Crush

When news of this video game related injury first made the wire services, the general reaction of gamers was nothing at all like the reaction of doctors, who proclaimed this injury the perfect example of the ferocious power of video game addiction.

In an article on the BBC website that closely mirrors other articles that describe this poor unfortunate gamer and his injury - the gamer is a 29-year-old American - the doctors claim that “his injury demonstrates why some people play video games excessively, become addicted or injure themselves.”

Seriously! And the thing is, they may have a point...

The gamer in question admitted to playing Candy Crush - presumably on his iPhone - all day for six to eight weeks! Whoa!

The details behind this tragic video game injury came to light due to the doctor who treated it writing it up for the Journal of the American Medical Association Internal Medicine- a peer-review journal for physicians that is published twice monthly and often includes articles that detail the odder cases that member physicians have treated.

Now before you start in on us for choosing this as our Number One - we did NOT pick it because the game was Candy Crush, and the gamer was a 29-year-old man from California - though actually those would have been good reasons... But no, that is not why it made the top of the list.

This one makes the top of the list because it represents a confusing contradiction of medical terms. And not just confusing to us mind you - it actually confuses both the doctor that wrote it up AND many of the doctors who have been discussing it. How? Glad you asked.

You see the problem with this video game related injury is not so much that the repetitive stress of playing the game caused the injury as it is the fact that the patient did not KNOW that they had torn the tendon in their thumb.

The doctor who wrote it up explained that the reason the injured patient did not immediately realize that they had been, in fact, injured, has to do with the very real, very genuine pain relief that is delivered to gamers by playing video games.

You read that correctly - playing video games over long periods of time has a beneficial pain relieving effect.

In the report on the injury that was co-written by Dr Andrew Doan, among the conclusions that were reached were (A) video games can interfere with when we feel pain, particularly when games are played excessively; and (B) future research should look at whether pain reduction is a reason some people play repeatedly, become addicted and suffer injuries.

So dear readers this is both an eye-opening video games related injury and a cautionary tale - from which we can only conclude that you are better off taking pain meds than using your video games to relive pain, because one relieves pain while the other? Could hurt you!

Posted: 28th May 2015 by CMBF
Tags: