Nintendo’s popular Wii system requires its players to get off the couch to play games that simulate actual sports, including bowling.

By ANDREW DAS


In the moments after I felt the pop in my left shoulder, the sensation I felt was not pain. It was panic. How exactly does a 40-year-old man explain to his wife that he might have torn his rotator cuff during a midnight game of Wii tennis?

Dr.Charles Young made me feel better without even examining me.

Late last year, Dr.Young, an orthopedic surgeon, spent about an hour experimenting with the balance games and strength-training exercises on his new Wii Fit. Running on a virtual trail. Slalom skiing. Walking on a tightrope.“I was really hurting,”said Dr.Young, who is completing a sports medicine fellowship at the Cleveland Clinic.

To say that Wii injuries are an epidemic would be an overstatement, but they are proliferating along with the popular video-game system. Interviews with orthopedists and sports medicine physicians revealed few serious injuries, but rather a phenomenon more closely resembling a spreading national ache: patients of all ages complaining of strains and swelling related to their use - and overuse - of the Wii.

Call it Wii Shoulder. Or Wii Knee. If there is an epidemic of anything, it probably falls under a broader label: Nintendinitis.

“Skateboarding, snowboarding, you name it,”said Dr.William N.Levine, the director of sports medicine at New-York-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center.“Take the newest fad, and there’s always a slew of specific orthopedic injuries associated with it.”

The difference now is that the surging sales of the Wii system mean that misery gets more company every day. Nintendo, which introduced the Wii in November 2006, sold more than 10 million of the game systems in the United States last year, including a record 2.1 million in December, and more than 50 million worldwide. The complementary Wii Fit exercise program has been nearly as popular, with more than 6.5 million sold since its introduction last May.

Consumers who avoided sedentary video-game systems have flocked to the Wii, which lures users off the couch with a handheld, wireless remote and a selection of familiar, free-swinging games like tennis, boxing and bowling. For some parents, and even grandparents, the games are a way to connect with children. The fact that everyone gets a little exercise along the way is an added plus.

“It’s great in the concept that it gets people active and involved,”said Dr.Brian Halpern, a sports medicine physician at the Hospital for Special Surgery in Manhattan.“It’s not great in that you get lost in that and are overloading areas that you haven’t worked out in a long time, if ever.”

Denise Kaigler, a vice president for marketing and corporate affairs at Nintendo of America, said in an e-mail message that“as consumers adapt to this new style of play, there have been a few reports of minor incidents during overly enthusiastic game play,”but that more health and safety warnings - about playing in an area free of obstructions, for example - had been added.

“It’s good to be a kid at heart,”said Dr.Susan Joy, the director of the Cleveland Clinic’s women’s sports health program.“But sometimes when you start a new exercise program, it’s good to remember that you’re not a kid.”