The Great Phone Epidemic – Part 1

The Great Phone Epidemic – Part 1

Claire - April 7, 2014

6:15am on a cold Monday morning in the middle of winter back in 2003. It was my very first day as a Technical Chiropractic Assistant. As the team gathered around the appointment book and started finding the patient files in the cabinet for the mornings appointments, a group began to gather on the veranda outside. I looked out to see tradies, people in suits and a couple in gym gear waiting for us to open. They were chatting and laughing among themselves and it continued as they filed inside and sat in the “hot seat” area. The music was cranked up, adjusting began, the talking increased, the energy sky-rocketed and it felt like a party. I thought to myself, ”Wow this is the best place in the world to be on a Monday morning. This place rocks.”

It was an amazingly busy practise and every adjusting set seemed the same. People made friends with those that had appointments around the same time and the party atmosphere was the standard. There were kids happily playing in the kid’s corner or running back and forth to show mum the plastic cow. Not only did it feel good being there, what I saw in the way of changes to people’s health was phenomenal.

Fast forward to today and “Hot Seat” areas in Chiropractic offices all over the world look very different during adjusting time. The music is still there, the people are still there but the energy has changed and the conversation has all but stopped. Now as soon as bottoms hit the seat, the phones come out and the focus is directed at the world of social media, games, emails, text messages… anything but the physical environment. This is the same on the train, in coffee shops, on the beach, at the family dinner table; there seems to no situation where the phone doesn’t make an appearance. We are spending so much energy connecting with people virtually that it appears we are losing sight of those immediately around us.

It is not just the teenagers falling into this pattern, older people do it, parents do too, kids and even toddlers and babies are handed the phone to stop them from communicating.

This phone epidemic is starting to have a huge impact on our health as a society and in a number of different ways. Spending hours interacting with our phones is changing not only how we interact with other actual people, but also our posture, our hormonal systems, our neurology, our immune systems and even down to our cellular biology.  Over the next few blog posts we are going to explore some of these serious effects of the phone epidemic.