Percussive massage guns are growing in popularity, but health experts warn that their improper use can have disastrous consequences. Case in point, a 20-something Scottish man who developed retinal dialysis after using a massage gun designed for muscle relief on his eyeballs.
When used correctly, massage guns can relieve pain, improve blood flow, and promote relaxation, but their effect on the eyes is demonstrably damaging, as a team of doctors showed in a case study published in the BMJ Case Reports journal. The patient, a young man from Edinburgh, Scotland, admitted to using a massage gun to relax his eyes for several weeks, which resulted in several deep retinal tears.
Doctors Niamh O’Connell and Ashraf Khan were shocked when the unnamed patient showed up at an eye treatment center in the Scottish capital, because both of his eyes were in terrible shape. His right eye had multiple retinal tears, widespread retinal bruising, and a condition called retinal dialysis, while the left eye also had significant retinal bruising and six small horseshoe tears.
Strangely enough, the man had no personal or family history of ocular disorders and had denied any previous head injury or trauma. He wore glasses for short-sightedness, with a prescription of −2.00 in the right and −2.25 in the left, but that was in no way connected to the lesions on his eyeballs.
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Left without a real explanation, the doctors asked the patient about anything “untoward involving the eyes,” and that was when he reluctantly told them that he had been using a percussive massage gun both around and directly on both eyes, on a weekly basis, for around three months. He hadn’t noticed anything unusual until a few days prior to his visit to the eye treatment center, when he started seeing floaters and flashing lights in his right eye.
Because the patient had no other risk factors for retinal pathology, the doctors concluded that the percussive massage gun was responsible for his serious eye trauma, adding that this was the first documented case of retinal dialysis with multiple bilateral retinal tears.
The young patient reportedly used the massage gun on his eyes to relieve the feeling of tiredness, but the percussive action had unintended consequences. The massage gun is believed to have rapidly compressed the eyeballs back, causing them to squish out from the sides, leading to retinal dialysis.
At 6 months after his diagnosis was set, the patient’s ocular status was stable without progression of the retinal dialysis or presence of cataracts.
Interestingly, this isn’t the first case of massage gun use causing severe visual impairment. A couple of years ago, we wrote about a 42-year-old Chinese man who used a massage gun on his eyes only to develop cataracts and suffer lens dislocation.
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