SCIENCE — Researchers have produced a study. The study is about the bathroom. The study has found that people who use their smartphones while on the toilet have a 46% higher risk of developing hemorrhoids than people who do not. This is the finding. The finding has been published. The finding is now in the public record and in this article and in the private awareness of approximately every person who read the headline and immediately looked at their phone.
The mechanism is understood. Extended time on the toilet — which smartphone use encourages, because the phone provides reasons to stay — increases pressure on the veins in the pelvic floor region. The human body was not designed to spend seventeen minutes reading breaking news about a war while seated at a particular angle in a small room. The veins know this. The veins have known this for some time. The study is the veins finally getting into the literature.
Yolanda Tippington, Science Correspondent, would like to begin by stating that this is a real study, that the methodology appears sound, and that the 46% figure is specific enough to suggest genuine data collection rather than a number chosen for rhetorical impact. The study’s authors are researchers. They collected data. The data said 46%. Yolanda is covering the 46%. She has questions about the 46% that she is going to keep brief, because the longer she spends on this article, the more she is aware of the structural similarities between writing a long article and doing the other thing for a long time, and she would like to be done.
What The Study Found, In Clinical Language That Will Not Help
People who use smartphones during bathroom visits have a 46% higher risk of hemorrhoids. The comparison group — people who do not use smartphones during bathroom visits — either exist in meaningful numbers or were difficult to locate, depending on which era the study was conducted in and whether the researchers had to explain the concept of not bringing a phone to the bathroom to participants who could not imagine why they would do that.
The study did not, per available reporting, specify which apps produced the greatest risk. This is a gap in the literature that Yolanda notes without filling, because filling it would require Yolanda to speculate about which apps are most likely to make a person stay seated longer than medically advisable, and that list writes itself, and she is not writing it, and you already have it in your head, and you’re welcome.
The study also did not specify a safe duration of phone use during bathroom visits. The guidance implied by the finding is: less than you’re currently doing. The guidance cannot be more specific than that without more data. The data says 46%. The 46% implies the direction. The direction is down. In multiple senses.
The Smart Underwear Study, Which Arrived The Same Week And Which Yolanda Is Connecting Because It Must Be Connected
In a development that Yolanda would like to think was coordinated but suspects was not, the same week that the toilet phone study entered the public discourse, a separate team of researchers published findings from a study using “Smart Underwear” — a wearable device that detects hydrogen produced by gut microbes — to measure flatulence frequency in real time.
The Smart Underwear study found that the average person passes gas approximately 32 times per day.
Thirty-two times. Per day. The researchers built underwear to find this out. The underwear worked. The underwear found 32. This is the number. The scientific community now has Smart Underwear and a flatulence frequency baseline and a 46% hemorrhoid risk figure from phone use and Yolanda is filing all three in the same week and is doing fine.
What the Smart Underwear study and the phone-on-toilet study have in common is that they are both studying the same general region of human experience that has historically not received robust academic attention, possibly because researchers had to justify the grant funding, and the Smart Underwear grant meeting was presumably a specific kind of meeting that the researchers prepared for carefully and delivered with straight faces.
Yolanda was not at the Smart Underwear grant meeting. Yolanda respects the researchers. Yolanda is going to move on.
The Practical Guidance, Which Is All Anyone Actually Wants
Put the phone down. Or at minimum, put the phone down faster than you currently do. The bathroom is approximately one room in your home. It has a specific purpose. The purpose does not require external input. Whatever is happening on your screen will still be happening when you return, and in the current news environment — which, as Supposedly News has been documenting since early March, includes an active war, a $103 oil price, treason threats against journalists, camels getting Botox in Oman, and Chad Thadley going to the Olympics — the news will not have resolved during the time you spent not reading it on the toilet.
You can wait. The 46% says you should wait. The veins agree with the 46%. The Smart Underwear is neutral on the question but is available if you need the data.
Yolanda Tippington, Science Correspondent, filed this article from her desk and not from the bathroom and would like that noted for the record. Confidence: 53%, which reflects genuine scientific confidence in the study’s findings and Yolanda’s personal confidence in the likelihood that anyone will change their bathroom behavior as a result of reading this, which she assesses at approximately 7%. The Smart Underwear researchers deserve a grant renewal. Gerald the houseplant has no phone. Gerald is fine. Gerald’s veins are also fine.