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Give us a break.
Gen Z is calling out of work for the same aches and pains as their elders — but at surprisingly higher rates.
In a new poll, per Daly Mail, 24% of workers aged 16 to 26 said they used neck or back pain as an excuse to skip work this year, while only 14% of those aged 59 and up, aka Baby Boomers, did the same. Meanwhile, the millennial cohort, aged 27 to 42, fell between them at 18% whereas only 12% of Gen Xers, aged 43 to 58, cited the same affliction.
The survey of 2,000 people was carried out by biotech company Alvica Medical.
Said their CEO, Victoria Fransen, “They are the most impacted when it comes to doing their job and there is certainly a correlation between this and them being the first true generation of digital natives.”
Of all ages combined, 63% reported having back and neck pain during the last 12 months.
Doctors have previously warned the younger generations of the looming threat of the so-called “tech neck,” a curvature of the upper spine due to years of poor posture — by looking down at smartphones and tablets for hours a day.
Chiropractor Jake Boyle, @desmoineschiro on TikTok, recently shared alarming X-ray images of crook-necked young adults he’s seen at his practice in Iowa.
“If you are under 35 you need to pay attention to this. We are all turning into those old hunched over people and there’s a reason behind it,” he said.
Boyle’s examples of hunchback zoomers coincided with evidence of skeletal “horns” growing from the base of some young peoples’ skulls, which has also been said to be a result of cellphone use.
The bizarre phenomenon is called an external occipital protuberance. First noted in 1885 by French scientist Paul Broca, the condition was so rare that it has gone almost entirely overlooked until now.
David Shahur, a biomechanics researcher and clinician at the University of The Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia, told the BBC in 2019 that “only in the last decade” has he seen patients with this deformation.
Shahur, whose work on external occipital protuberances has previously been published in the Journal of Anatomy, hypothesized that the habitual bent-neck posture held by mobile device users can put extra pressure at the point where the neck muscles meet the skull.
“Imagine if you have stalactites and stalagmites, if no one is bothering them, they will just keep growing,” he warned.