Face piercing (body art): choosing pleasure vs. possible pain and posture instability

Eric Matheron

doi:10.3389/fphys.2011.00064

Abstract

Piercings (body art, i.e., with jewelry) are more and more widespread. They can induce various complications such as infections, allergies, headaches, and various skin, cartilage, or dental problems, and represent a public health problem. We draw attention to possible side effects resulting from face piercing complications observed on four young adults such as eye misalignment, decreased postural control efficiency, and non-specific chronic back pain with associated comorbidity. We found that the origin was pierced jewelry on the face. Removing the jewelry restored eye alignment, improved postural control, and alleviated back pain in a lasting way. We suggest that pierced facial jewelry can disturb somaesthetic signals driven by the trigeminal nerve, and thus interfere with central integration processes, notably in the cerebellum and the vestibular nucleus involved in postural control and eye alignment. Facial piercings could induce sensory–motor conflict, exacerbate, or precipitate a pre-existing undetermined conflict, which leads pain and complaints. These findings are significant for health; further investigations would be of interest.

Highlights

Vertical heterophoria (VH) can be induced by eye refraction problems (Amos and Rutstein, 1987), but without refraction problems, VH of small size (
MATERIALS AND METHODS Four subjects wearing facial jewelry pierced in eyebrow, tragus, upper lip, and nose (Figure 1) retained our attention; they suffered from non-specific chronic back pain with an additional comorbidity such as dizziness, headache, or eyestrain known in non-specific chronic back pain (Von Korff et al, 2003; Hagen et al, 2006), associated with a VH (Matheron and Kapoula, 2011)
The results of four cases are not sufficient to generalize, but suggest that piercings could create more complications than those currently described in literature; we found binocular misalignment, reduced postural control efficiency, and nonspecific chronic back pain

Summary

Introduction

Vertical heterophoria (VH) and vertical orthophoria are respectively the presence or the absence of a relative deviation of the vertical visual axes when the retinal images are dissociated, i.e., each eye views a different image (see Amos and Rutstein, 1987). VH can be induced by eye refraction problems (Amos and Rutstein, 1987), but without refraction problems, VH of small size (

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Conclusion