Dr. Trisha Pasricha

Do you bring your smartphone to the bathroom?

What do you do on the smartphone when you're in there?

And then we also asked them about diet and other habits that we know are part of their bowel habits.

And then we did their colonoscopies.

We took a look.

We visualized, do you have hemorrhoids?

Do you not have hemorrhoids?

And it turns out in this population, the majority of people are bringing their smartphones in there.

That's probably not a huge surprise.

But the people who brought their smartphones in, just bringing your smartphone into the bathroom was associated with a 46% increased risk of having hemorrhoids.

That's not a joke.

That's a big number right there.

And we accounted for things like how much fiber they were taking in, how much they exercised, how much they sat at work, all of these other factors that in constipation, how much they strained.

Those are traditional risk factors for hemorrhoids, but it turns out just this seemed to increase their risk independently.

And again, this is a study that looked at an association.

It didn't prove causation, but what we think is happening is that when you bring your smartphone into the bathroom and you're sitting on this open toilet bowl,

where there's no pelvic floor support.

So you start to have this passive pressure that's filling up the veins.

So hemorrhoids are just veins.

They're just cushions of veins that eventually they fill, they become engorged, enlarged, and then we notice them.