Last year, two Los Angeles women, ages 31 and 48, visited Cedars-Sinai Hospital on separate occasions suffering from a mysterious and debilitating illness.
They suffered the classic symptoms of vertigo: a condition that causes constant dizziness and feels like you’re on an endless carnival ride.
Most patients also suffer from nausea, making it difficult for them to even get out of bed.
There was no obvious cause in either case as both women were relatively young and healthy.
Doctors were baffled, until they discovered that patients shared a daily habit: using a battery-powered massager, like Theragun, to relieve shoulder and neck pain.
Vertigo is a condition that causes severe dizziness, nausea, and difficulty moving. In a 2020 case study, one victim described it as feeling like being on a carnival ride.
When doctors asked the women to abandon their gun massage routine, their conditions were cured almost immediately.
These two cases led Dr. Ronen Nazarian, an otolaryngologist at Cedars-Sinai and doctoral student David Elisha, to conclude that using devices like Theragun on the shoulders and neck can cause people to develop a rare condition called paroxysmal positional vertigo. benign (BPPV).
They explain that the intense vibrations emitted by the device can, in rare cases, upset the ear’s intricate balance mechanism.
Now, they want to warn users that using this wellness device could cause discomfort.
“Manufacturers should issue widespread warnings about the risks of vertigo associated with these devices, especially when used near the head and upper neck,” they wrote in their case report, published in JAMA Otorhinolaryngology Head and Neck Surgery.
Theragun is by no means the only brand of this type of massager, but it is by far the most popular brand in the US, which represents 71 percent of the market from 2021.
The original Theragun sells online for $149. Other retailers, such as HyperVolt and RecoverFun, sell their massage guns for $199 and $99 respectively.
These massagers are sold to provide a concentrated deep tissue massage to relieve sore muscles.
Devices are used to relieve tension in the neck, shoulders, and even the base of the skull.
Vertigo develops when there is an alteration of the balance system in the inner ear. This may be due to head trauma or, in the case study presented by Dr. Nazarian, frequent vibrations.
BPPV is a relatively rare condition. About 3.2 percent of people develop it each year, the authors write.
It occurs when the organs that control balance, which are found in the inner ear, are altered. This set of organs, called the vestibular system, looks like a pair of snails.
Several things can disrupt the inner ear, including infections, strokes, and medications. But most cases of this type of vertigo are caused by head trauma, such as concussions, falls, or assaults.
The disturbance causes your body to lose its sense of balance and, as a result, develop dizziness, unsteadiness, nausea, lightheadedness, vomiting, and difficulty moving.
It makes you feel like you’re “on a carnival ride,” an unidentified vertigo sufferer shared in a 2020 case report.
But as the study establishes, intense and frequent vibrations also cause vertigo.
Dr. Nazarian suggests in the article that vertigo caused by vibrations may be underreported, and that even the use of electric toothbrushes could be enough to trigger the condition.
While this may seem far-fetched, other medical experts agree.
Biking over rough terrain and intense aerobic exercise have also caused cases of vertigo, according to Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.
This mechanism could be taking place with massage guns, which prick the body between 1,700 and 5,000 times per minute, representing between 31 and 70 pounds of force.
This amount of force could cause the small functions that control our balance in the inner ear to jostle, the authors say, causing vertigo.