Nintendo Invents a Disease … ‘Wiiitis’

By Michael Santo
Executive Editor, RealTechNews

The Wii is actually a video game that can help you work up a sweat … tennis, boxing, baseball can all, if you work at it, get the sweat pouring off of you. Tennis, eh? Well, at least one doctor has both experienced and named a disease, which was not quite tennis elbow, but ‘wiiitis’.

When Dr. Julio Bonis awoke one Sunday morning with a sore shoulder, he could not figure out what he had done. It felt like a sports injury, but he had been a bit of a couch potato lately. Then he remembered his new Wii.

It was not quite tennis elbow, he decided. “The variant in this patient can be labelled more specifically as ‘Wiiitis,’” Bonis, a family practice physician, wrote in a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine. Source: Reuters

We Say: Sounds like the doctor is speaking tongue-in-cheek, but he’s not. He’s expecting there may be more of these incidents in the future if Nintendo releases more sports games. And let’s not forget an earlier ailment produced by Nintendo … Nintenditis (though that was a thumb problem).