Wii - Ever Heard of Tennis Elbow? How about Wiiitis?

Oh how I've been waiting for this piece of news to arrive. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against Nintendo and their record selling Wii, but I've always wanted to prove how equally bad it is regarding certain aspects. Such as, what happens if you play Wii Sports for too long, or without proper warm-up?

I've started off innocently as a games editor, but when I first laid my eyes on the Wii and that wretched controller of its, I knew that it was bound to get some bad news, having such an abnormal control scheme. And yes, I still can't hit the ball at Tennis, but that doesn't mean there's something wrong with the Wii, Wii Sports or Wii Remote. There's something wrong with me, obviously.

Ok, enough babbling, here's the story:

"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," posts Reuters.

But then, Bonis remembered he had played the Wii: "Bonis, 29, had spent hours playing Nintendo's new video game in which players simulate real movements. Bonis had been playing simulated tennis. 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. "The treatment consisted of ibuprofen for one week, as well as complete abstinence from playing Wii video games. The patient recovered fully."

Reuters reports that "Wiiitis -- pronounced "wee-eye-tis" -- is the latest ailment to develop from the video game era, beginning with Space Invaders' wrist in 1981, which was caused by the repeated button mashing required by the popular arcade game."

Sounds like a joke doesn't it? I thought so too, bet it's as real as it gets. "What convinced me to send the case report was that a friend of mine, after playing 'Wii Sports' suffered from a similar complaint," Bonis told Reuters in an e-mail. "I have not found other cases in my clinical practice, but it is probably an underdiagnosed condition."

And here comes the proof, that it's not at all a joke: "In 1990, a Wisconsin doctor characterized the thumb soreness brought on by pushing the buttons on a controller as "Nintendinitis" after it affected a 35-year-old woman who played a Nintendo game without interruption for five hours," the site reports.

The thing is, it would be strange if anything didn't happen after doing whatever for 5 whole hours. But going and actually naming the conditions Wiititis and Nintendinitis...? Just because of some button mashing...?