Devil, thy name is spandex. Or, to be more specific, “spanx.” It seems that the most athletic of our young women (and, I suppose, some of our young men) are risking nerve damage by wearing extremely tight spandex compression shorts underneath their uniforms. This is sort of like the Dez Bryant situation in reverse. From NPR:
The startling report comes from Dr. Orly Avitzur, medical adviser to Consumer Reports on Health. She saw a 15-year-old girl last week who had been suffering numbness, pain and tingling in her thigh for several months. A worried orthopedist had sent the girl to Avitzur, a neurologist in Tarrytown, N.Y.
Avitzur knew that tight garments can cause pain and numbness in the thigh if they squeeze the lateral femoral cutaneous nerve, which runs down the abdomen just below the hipbone. The condition’s called meralgia paresthetica.
Sounds erotic painful.
It turned out that not only was this girl wearing Spanx under her soccer uniform, so was the entire team.
It’s part of the continuing fad of tight-fitting compression garments like Under Armour, which many athletes wear on the presumption that they improve performance and reduce muscle soreness. But there’s not much evidence for that. Shots did a quick PubMed scan on sports performance and compression garments, and it looks like the benefits are largely psychological.
WE MUST PROTECT THIS HOUSE, BUT ARE CONSIDERABLY LESS WORRIED ABOUT OUR LONG-TERM NERVE CARE. Strange, teenage girls usually have such amazing foresight.
Here’s hoping news of this peril spreads everywhere before it’s too late and we face some sort of nation-wide spandemic.
Sorry, that one was a bit of a stretch.
***
