The next time you tap away an email on your smartphone, pay attention to your posture.
Your smartphone may be causing you neck and back pain by the way you strain forward to use the device, warned Dr. Alton Barron, an orthopedic surgeon at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital, on CBS's This Morning.
"We are straining our muscles both in our necks and our upper backs and our shoulders to accommodate for this position," Barron said on the show.
A couple of years ago, a study was presented at the American Public Health Association showing that neck and shoulder pain reported by college students can be attributed to their cell phone habits, WebMD reported.
"What we've seen so far is very similar to what we see with office workers who've spent most of their time at a computer," study researcher Judith Gold, ScD, assistant professor of epidemiology at Temple University, told WebMD. "The way the body is positioned for texting -- stationary shoulders and back with rapidly moving fingers -- is similar to the position for typing on a computer."
MSNBC reported that the condition has been dubbed "text neck" by South Florida chiropractor Dean Fishman, whose youngest patient is a 3-year-old.
For more on how your smartphone habits could be hurting your posture and giving you pain, watch the video.