Give us a break.
Gen Z is looking out of labor for a similar aches and pains as their elders — but at surprisingly higher rates.
In a latest poll, per Daly Mail, 24% of staff aged 16 to 26 said they used neck or back pain as an excuse to skip work this yr, while only 14% of those aged 59 and up, aka Baby Boomers, did the identical. Meanwhile, the millennial cohort, aged 27 to 42, fell between them at 18% whereas only 12% of Gen Xers, aged 43 to 58, cited the identical affliction.
The survey of two,000 people was carried out by biotech company Alvica Medical.
Said their CEO, Victoria Fransen, “They’re probably the most impacted in the case of doing their job and there may be definitely a correlation between this and them being the primary true generation of digital natives.”
Of all ages combined, 63% reported having back and neck pain through the last 12 months.
Doctors have previously warned the younger generations of the looming threat of the so-called “tech neck,” a curvature of the upper spine as a result of years of poor posture — by looking down at smartphones and tablets for hours a day.
Chiropractor Jake Boyle, @desmoineschiro on TikTok, recently shared alarming X-ray images of crook-necked young adults he’s seen at his practice in Iowa.
“Should you are under 35 that you must listen to this. We’re all turning into those old hunched over people and there’s a reason behind it,” he said.
Boyle’s examples of hunchback zoomers coincided with evidence of skeletal “horns” growing from the bottom of some young peoples’ skulls, which has also been said to be a results of cellphone use.
The bizarre phenomenon is known as an external occipital protuberance. First noted in 1885 by French scientist Paul Broca, the condition was so rare that it has gone almost entirely missed until now.
David Shahur, a biomechanics researcher and clinician on the University of The Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia, told the BBC in 2019 that “only within the last decade” has he seen patients with this deformation.
Shahur, whose work on external occipital protuberances has previously been published within the Journal of Anatomy, hypothesized that the habitual bent-neck posture held by mobile device users can put extra pressure at the purpose where the neck muscles meet the skull.
“Imagine if you have got stalactites and stalagmites, if nobody is bothering them, they are going to just continue to grow,” he warned.
