Cradling the phone between the neck and shoulder is certainly not good for the neck. But for one French psychiatrist, it was bad for his brain too. After the psychiatrist, 43, talked that way over the phone for an hour, he lost vision in his left eye and had difficulty speaking. A brain scan showed that pressure from a bone called the styloid process, which runs behind the jaw, had caused a tear in the artery that supplies blood to the brain, disrupting the flow. The psychiatrist, whose styloid processes were unusually long, recovered the next day. He now holds the phone in his hand, said Mathieu Zuber, a neurologist at the Sainte-Anne Hospital in Paris, France, who treated the psychiatrist ( Neurology , Vol 53, No 8).
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