By Kathleen Noonan                                                                                              October 31, 2008 11:00pm

 

No wonder masseurs, physiotherapists and chiropractors love laptops.

Laptops or notebook PCs, these amazing, portable little envelopes of technology, have transformed our lives and are wrecking our necks.

Because of their all-in-one clam-shell design, it is nearly impossible to get a good posture with them. Throw in poor posture and everyday stress and tension, and we end up regulars at the rooms of masseurs, physios and bone crackers.

We walk in stiffly and miserably with what the experts often call non-specific neck pain. My technical term for it is cricked neck. I've had it so long, my crick is like a friend I hate; it is painful yet constant and familiar.

The pain wakes you gently from sleep at night, nudging you awake, more urgent yet sneakier than an alarm clock or a crying child.

The proverbial pain in the neck affects many of us regularly and some of us constantly. At least once in our lifetime, 30 per cent of men and 50 per cent of women suffer.

You know the routine. You rise and walk through the house, avoiding the noisy floorboards that give old Queenslanders their ship-like creak. You stop to stretch on door frames to try to pull the vertebrae apart and lengthen muscles, hoping to luck upon the sweet spot that will solve everything.

I pad out to the kitchen on autopilot, go to the medicine box, take two analgesics, and heat up the wheat pack in the microwave. Then try to decide between a hot cup of tea or glass of whisky. I compromise on a hot toddy, tea with a clove and whisky - strictly medicinal, of course.

Is there nothing we won't try to get rid of a cricked neck? Eating Chinese herbs. Giving up coffee, sugar, dairy and bread. Taking up weights. Stretching. Yoga. I've been pummelled, massaged, manipulated, cracked, hot-rocked, cupped, needled and X-rayed. All with varying success.

Experts tell you to change your bed, change your diet, change your life, change your work station, change your bra, change your habits, change your pillow. In a desperate moment, I purchase a $99 pillow, a heavy foam and latex thing designed by NASA scientists. It feels like a brick and made absolutely no difference - except I win all the pillow fights. So I go back to the old $5 department store pillow.

I went to a round little man once about my neck who advised eating mostly large amounts of root vegetables such as radishes. Another pressed tiny vials of food against my body while pushing down on one raised arm to test my allergy "weaknesses" and said to give up all bread, meat, wheat, dairy, eggs, sugar, coffee and alcohol.

"What about sex?" I ask.

 He looked at me strangely.

"Well, you've taken all the other vices."

Chronic pain costs Australia $34.3 billion each year. About 3.2 million Australians live with persistent pain and our ageing population is expected to push that to five million by 2050, according to the High Price of Pain report. Back pain is the most common type of persistent pain, making up 60 to 70 per cent of cases. This is followed by neck and shoulder pain. The researchers found it affected work, relationships, activity levels and mood.

Yet, we learn to live with it and even laugh at it. Who could forget Kim from Kath & Kim when she came down one morning, after slipping and falling the night before while pole dancing. Wearing a neck brace she whinged: "I've cricked my neck and cracked my clack."

Yes, strange things can give you a cricked neck. A woman I know has just had a baby, her third, a big healthy thing. She has neck pain.

"I can't figure out if it's carrying this baby around or carrying these huge milk jugs around," she says looking down at her F-cup maternity bra. (A note to men: only women get to refer to their own breasts as such.) A physio diagnosed a mixture of both.

Once upon a time neck pain was the domain of people over 50, as the spine degenerates, a physio tells me.

Today, worldwide, clients are getting younger and younger. He treats many teenagers - "they use their laptops in bed, the lounge, beanbags, on the bus, anywhere".

"I see them with their laptops balanced on their knees typing as they have their mobile phones tucked between their ears and shoulders. I can't tell you how bad this is."

 He has treated a seven-year-old who was addicted to his laptop. Just repeating, a seven-year-old.

(Teenage boys out there, if you don't care about your neck, think of your balls. A US study has found heat generated from laptops when used on laps can significantly elevate the temperature of the scrotum, potentially putting sperm count at risk.)

Back to necks, a major West Australian study, exploring the risk of musculoskeletal disorders, shows 60 per cent of children using laptops for an average of 3.2 hours a day reported physical discomfort, an early warning sign of the risk of MSDs.

Yet, I love my laptop. But here is the problem with the little mongrels. When you are using them, you are supposed to keep your ears, shoulders and hips in line and with the top of your computer screen just below the height of your eyes.

So, if we put our laptop in place to allow this - whacking the good old thick Yellow Pages to achieve it - we can't see the keys. Laptops with fixed keyboards make it impossible to get the screen and keyboard in ergonomic position at the same time. To do this you need to plug in either a separate keyboard, which sort of defeats the whole portable laptop point. There are laptops around that you can click apart and separate screen from keyboard but they are in the minority.

The problem is not going to go away. Ten years ago 17 per cent of personal computers sold worldwide were laptops. By next year computer analysts say laptops will overtake desktops.

Travelling makes it worse. I sling the thing over my shoulder to take on as hand luggage on the plane, lugging its weight around on one shoulder. Which means I end up in strange cities with a cricked neck and bad mood.

While in transit at the Singapore airport, I was so desperate I sought out a dodgy looking Chinese masseur between flights. He stuck pure oxygen tubes up my nose and began cupping me. This ancient healing technique used to be done with bamboo, brass or animal horn cups but today glass cups are used. They are heated with alcohol and flame on the inside to reduce the pressure, then placed over the skin. As the cup cools down, the skin is sucked up inside. It's all got to do with cold energy in the patient's meridians and warming the chi.

I arrived home with my back covered in peculiar little bruises, all black and yellow, as if frisky foals had tap-danced on me.

Sound bizarre? With a cricked neck you would tango with a witchdoctor if it would fix it. You will try anything, anywhere.

It is still the middle of the night and the house is quiet and the city sighs. Even the drunks down the street are subdued tonight and the possums are sleeping. I wish to be back in bed, asleep, purring contentedly (not snoring) as women do. But that is not going to happen until the anti-inflammatories kick in.

The moon streaming through the French doors is "soft and copious" as Walt Whitman called it. So I put on Gossip in the Grain, the latest release from Ray Lamontagne, who sounds like a raspy angel and looks like Jesus. It follows his splendid albums Trouble and Till The Sun Turns Black. I curl up in a large wing-back chair with heat pack, hot toddy and John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces.

I need to finish this Pulitzer Prize-winning book for book club. The New York Times called it a pungent work of slapstick, satire and intellectual incongruities. Critics have said you either love it or hate it. I am in limbo land with this book, both hating it and loving it. Like my laptop.

noonank@qnp.newsltd.com.au