Strange injuries: How blowing your nose too hard can fracture your skull and your PlayStation console can cause sores on your palms

• Last month, doctors announced a modern plague called ‘text neck’
• Medics have amassed a mountain of other injury perils to make us fret
• Making the bed can cause blood clots and love bites may damage veins
• Post-coital amnesia involves a complete memory loss after lovemaking

By John Naish for the Daily Mail

Published: 18:12 EST, 5 January 2015 | Updated: 18:12 EST, 5 January 2015

A vigorous snort into a hankie might clear your airways, but it could also fracture your skull

Human ingenuity knows no bounds when it comes to ways in which we can injure ourselves.

Last month, doctors announced a modern plague called ‘text neck’.

This afflicts people who spend hours every day with their heads down, staring at their smartphones.

Dr Kenneth Hansraj, the chief of spine surgery at the New York Spine Surgery and Rehabilitation Medicine centre, says the sustained posture puts an unnatural load on the neck.

‘It may lead to early wear, tear, degeneration and possibly the need for surgery,’ he warns in the journal Surgical Technology International.

And that’s just phones.

Over recent years, medics have amassed a mountain of other injury perils to make us fret.

Here are some of the wildest and weirdest.

NOSE-BLOWER'S FRACTURE

A vigorous snort into a hankie might clear your airways, but it could also fracture your skull or even traumatise the heart muscle.

Doctors at Birmingham City Hospital reported how a 20-year-old woman blew her nose so hard that the pressure had blasted air through a crack in her skull, and found its way into her chest cavity. This had left her in agony, the medics wrote in the Journal of Laryngology & Otology.

Fortunately, she recovered after rest and treatment with painkillers.

Last May, German doctors reported in the American Journal of Otolaryngology how a woman had her upper and lower right eyelids hugely puffed up with air after she had tried to clear her right nostril by blowing through it while blocking the left one with her finger.

And in July last year, doctors in Germany reported how a 69-year-old suffered a small rupture in the wall of his heart muscle by blowing his nose hard.

The force had also caused a sudden rise in blood pressure, leaving him with stroke-like slurred speech and a paralysed right arm, says a report in the International Journal of General Medicine. The symptoms eased within hours.

SHEET-FITTING PALSY

Surely making the bed can’t be that dangerous? Doctors have discovered otherwise. They warn how repeatedly trying to pull a fitted sheet over the corner of a mattress can cause blood clots.

The continuous flexing movement of the wrist backwards and forwards results in a tiny clot in the main artery feeding the hand, causing numbness or weakness.

Francis Walker, a neurologist at the Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, North Carolina, christened the condition ‘sheet-fitting palsy’ in 2012 in the journal Clinical Neuromuscular Disease. It has also been reported in basketball players and keep-fit fans who habitually do push-ups.

PLAYSTATION PALMS

PLAYSTATION PALMS: The doctors blamed tight, continuous grasping of the console

Hidradenitis is a skin disorder that generally causes small red, sore lumps on the skin and is thought to be linked to intense sweating.

It has been previously found on the soles of the feet in people taking part in heavy physical activity, such as running.

Now it has been discovered to afflict fans of computer games.

This problem was first identified by doctors at the Geneva University Hospital in Switzerland, who treated a 12-year-old girl for intensely painful sores on her palms.

Investigations revealed that she had recently started to play a video game on a PlayStation console, holding a plastic control pad for several hours a day, and continued playing even after she developed the sores.

The doctors named the condition ‘PlayStation palmar hidradenitis’ and blamed tight, continuous grasping of the console, repeated pushing of the buttons and sweating caused by game-related tension.

LOVE-BITE STROKE

Love bites may seriously damage veins and nerves.

In one particularly nasty case in 2011, a 44-year-old woman was left paralysed by a love bite which damaged a neck artery.

This peril was first identified by Finnish neurologists in 1980 who treated a young man for severe pain in his neck and shoulder.

After a ‘rather vigorous’ love bite from his girlfriend, the victim took six months to fully recover from the resulting crushed nerve.

Even passionate kissing carries risks. In 2008, a young woman from Guangdong province in China lost her hearing in one ear for two months after a goodbye kiss from her boyfriend.

‘It reduced the pressure in the mouth, pulled the eardrum out and caused the breakdown of the ear,’ her doctor told the China Daily newspaper.

HULA-HOOP SCIATICA

The hula-hoop is currently enjoying a comeback as a fitness craze, but fans should be warned

This Sixties sensation is currently enjoying a comeback as a fitness craze, with even America’s First Lady, Michelle Obama, having been seen exercising with a hula hoop.

But fans should be warned. A 63-year-old hula hooping enthusiast suffered a slipped disc in her spine, which had to be removed by emergency surgery. She was fortunate to recover without lasting nerve damage, the Chinese surgeons reported in the Kaohsiung Journal of Medical Sciences in December 2003.

Similar cases were reported during the original craze in the 1950s, where participants suffered back spasms and ruptured abdominal muscles.

ROLLER-COASTER HEART

Fairground rides often claim to be heart-stopping. In some unfortunate cases, they really are.

Dr Jurgen Koschyk, a cardiologist at University Hospital in Mannheim, Germany, studied 55 men and women, with an average age of 28, who had been on extreme roller-coaster rides.

He found that the sudden adrenaline rush can cause arrhythmia, or an irregular heartbeat, in some individuals who previously had shown no symptoms.

U.S. doctors reported in the Annals of Emergency Medicine that, over a 20-year period, American roller-coaster rides have been blamed for four cases of brain bruising, six burst arteries, three brain haemorrhages and one stroke.

Meanwhile, a French doctor, Valerie Biousse, reported in the Lancet in 1995 how a normally healthy 31-year-old woman dance teacher suffered a mild stroke caused by damage to an artery in her neck after going on the Space Mountain roller-coaster in Disneyland Paris.

‘The roller-coaster might have induced uncontrolled rotation of the head,’ said Dr Biousse.

BEAUTY-PARLOUR PALSY

BEAUTY-PARLOUR PALSY: In 2007, researchers at the Mayo Clinic in Arizona reported that a woman was left with permanent pain in her left arm after receiving a strong neck massage that damaged her spinal nerves

Even massages may be a potential risk. In 2007, researchers at the Mayo Clinic in Arizona reported that a 38-year-old woman was left with permanent pain in her left arm after receiving a strong neck massage that damaged her spinal nerves.

Dr Edzard Ernst, formerly the professor of complementary medicine at the University of Exeter, says that there are at least 18 reported examples of ‘moderately severe’ reactions to normal massage, especially of the neck.

A related injury was reported by Michael Weintraub, of the New York Medical College, who examined five females taken to hospital suffering strokes after visiting the hairdresser.

The women, aged from 54 to 84, left the salons with a range of symptoms, from dizziness to partial paralysis.

Dr Weintraub believes arteries carrying blood to the brain were injured when their heads were stretched backwards over the salons’ sinks, creating a phenomenon he named ‘beauty-parlour palsy’.

HEAVY-METAL HEADACHE

Last year, neurosurgeons reported how a 50-year-old man was brought to hospital complaining of a constant worsening headache.

There seemed no obvious cause, until the man revealed that he had been headbanging at a Motorhead concert a month previously.

An MRI scan revealed a blood clot in his brain, says a report in the Lancet in July, thought to be triggered by vigorously shaking his head.

Another related condition has been labelled Sid Vicious syndrome after the Sex Pistols rocker.

Victims suffer haemorrhaging in the eyes, caused by punk rock pogo-dancing.

A case was reported by the Harvard doctor Robert Caspari, in the New England Journal of Medicine in December 1980, after examining a 20-year-old rocker with unexplained haemorrhaging in both eyes.

POST-COITAL AMNESIA

This condition involves a complete loss of memory after vigorous lovemaking.

A report in the Japanese Journal of Psychiatry and Neurolology in 1993 tells how one woman patient developed a sudden isolated bout of complete memory loss after having sex. She regained her memory after six hours.

One theory is that intercourse triggers a rise in blood pressure. This then drops rapidly, which can cause a temporary fall in the brain’s oxygen supply.