Thursday, June 07, 2007

Oddly Enough

Today's New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) has a Correspondence article on "Acute Wiiitis." I had to count my i's when I typed that. Apparently, a resident woke with intense pain in the right shoulder: acute tendonitis of the right infraspinatus. This was not tennis elbow. Instead, the resident had been playing tennis on a Nintendo Wii. I was quite amused that the article describes the Wii remote ("Wiimote") in quite a bit of detail ("14.5 cm by 3.0 cm by 3.0 cm, with a weight of approximately 200 g"). The final diagnosis was a subtype of "Nintendinitis," appropriately named "Wiiitis." The treatment (though there haven't been any case-control studies demonstrating its effectiveness) was ibuprofen 1 week and no more Wii. After considering the multitude of different video games for this system, the article concludes, "Physicians should be aware that there may be multiple, possibly puzzling presentations of Wiiitis."

And you thought it was hard to get published in NEJM.

http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/extract/356/23/2431

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