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Dear Alan,
I’ve just discovered your blog and will definitely be following it. I live in Victoria, Canada (on the west coast). I’ve had RSI for 10 years. At it’s worst I was off work for 7 months. It’s under control now, but I’ve always got to be aware. I’ve become ultra sensitive to every little twinge, which helps me stay healthy. I also have some ergonomic software on my computer which works, as long as I don’t ignore the breaks
Cindy
Dear Alan,
I have been suffering from RSI for the last two years now. It is slowly getting better, also because of the tips from your great blog!
My biggest problem while working on the computer is that I forget to take breaks and always slouch forward.. Therefore I have created an “ergonomic posture reminder” (a printable PDF document to stick on the wall next to my screen) which can be found here: http://www.repetitive-strain-injury.de/english
Keep up your interesting posts!
Clemens
In every organisation there are workers with some degree of special needs.
It is the responsibility of every employer to make sure that they provide the tools to allow the employee to complete their work, in an environment which is safe and comfortable.
In the UK, this responsibility is enforced by law. It’s called the Disability Discrimination Act and it requires that:
All workplaces and places to which the public has access, provide whatever help may be needed to allow a disabled person to be involved in the company’s activities on as equal as possible a basis as an able-bodied person.
Disability could mean dyslexia, a wheelchair user, somebody with low vision or an RSI sufferer.
I am a copywriter and suffered the pain of RSI for the first time this year. The burning sensation in my fingers and wrist prevented me from doing my job! The company I work for instantly installed RSIGuard on my PC. It’s a piece of software which monitors your mouse movement and keyboard strokes. It offers breaks, exercises and tips to prevent and manage my pain. I was also given an Evoluent mouse to use. The best way to describe it is a mouse on it’s side! My hand was kept in a vertical position which was comfortable and felt more natural.
It took some time to get used to doing the exercises, and I got some funny looks! But I don’t care as I’m not in pain anymore and now some other people in the office are using it too.
It’s a real mark of the quality of company I work for that they acted quickly and found the right solution for me.
The company they used to help me is http://www.keytools.co.uk
Thanks for your comments Leigh. You make a lot of very valid points. You are of course benefiting from the last 15+ years of RSI awareness that employers and IT suppliers now have. When my initial symptoms developed, there were no ergonomic mice/keyboards available, and the knowledge about these conditions was very poor. Fortunately, now there are numerous input devices and software available for ergonomics/RSI. I only wish they had been available back in the mid 1990’s!
It’s good to hear that you have managed to find a solution that works for you. I hope you continue to be pain free!
Alan
I’ve had RSI for 5 years and when it was really bad I used an ingenius free software product to replace keyboard typing by just moving a mouse (no clicking and it’s not a virtual keyboard either) called Dasher (http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/). It looks rather bizarre and confusing at first but after a few tries you will be amazed how easy and fast it is to use.
I’ve also greatly improved my RSI and am on the way to curing it by concentrating hard on my muscles everyday to first become concious of the tension that I had been unaware was still there and then to gain suficient control to relx that tension with my mind. I learned I had to do the same for my upper arms, neck and shoulders to eliminate all roots of the problems.
Hope this helps!
Thanks Greg, looks like an interesting tool, have added a link to it on the ‘Utilities’ page on this site. I agree with you, being aware of and then learning to reduce the upper body muscle stresses is the key to helping RSI conditions. It can be difficult to do in stressful office environment though, and I didn’t recognise this until it was to late. Any tips to share with us?
You’re welcome Alan, and thanks for your interesting blog. My RSI conditions are almost identical to yours, except without the upper forearm extensor pain (more towards the middle in my case, but the same burning pain/ache on back of hands, wrists etc.). I only realised in March ‘07 that all this tension was there, that it was preventing me from recovering and that I could potentially cure myself. I spend hours everyday trying to fix my arms (although most of the time for the past year, I’ve instead spend that time concentrating on an rsi-type voice problem that resulted from voice recogniton software misuse). It took a year to get good awareness of the muscle tension and to get reasonable control (I kept finding that my brain’s interior map of my body was incomplete e.g. I thought I was sure I was sensing my entire forearms and hands, but it was just the core area – expanding this “map” is the key to relaxing the muscles).
I hit a wall until several months ago. I realised the ends of my forearm extensors where they meet the elbow were still tensed, causing the entire muscles to be under tension (my interior map of where my elbow was didn’t match my exterior map that stops me bumping into doors etc. – I was only able to sense part of my elbow area) and later, that I must fully relax my neck so that I can relax my shoulders so that I can relax my upper arms so that I can fully relax my elbows so that I can relax my lower arms! Now I’m vastly better at sensing and releasing tension all over than when I started, and know what normal feels like, and it takes less and less time to get there, although if I concentrate on the voice prob for a few weeks and neglect my arms I become rusty. When i get it normal I can do everything I used to do, computer for hours, long drives etc. with almost no pain (although not repeatedly day after day yet). If I don’t get it feeling normal, I have the same old pain problems after a while. Normal is something I keep redefining as I improve – you will have to become far more relaxed than you ever were pre-rsi, almost super-human, but that’s a good thing. It feels great!
Every time I’ve hit a wall in my progress, it’s always because there I need to more thoroughly relax my muscles, and the fascia enveloping them, which plays a big role in why the arms need the everything up to the head and neck to relax (the fascia seamlessly covers all these muscles and becomes thicker and less flexible under rsi due to stress hormones and tension). I can’t stress enough that you must persevere to be able to fully relax your muscles. It helps to aim to relax your entire body, to get your brain’s default body tension state to change. It will eventually feel like taking off a space suit. You fingers will move incredibly freely and the old way will seem very stiff in comparison.
I’m very confident that after 5 years, I’m on the way out of the tunnel,but it will take another year or 2 I guess for me to return to a computer based job. This is the only place I’ve posted about my story, but when I’m cured or nearly cured, I intend to set up a site going into great detail of my methods (I’ve handwritten pages of notes as I progress with relaxation techniques, including self administered acupuncture, visualization methods etc.). Typing this for 15mins has been no problem (I’ve been surfing for around 4 hours today) with barely any arm preparation. Unthinkable a year ago! My muscles are learning the new default relaxed state! My shoulders don’t even tense during horror movies! Without the enormous distraction of having to fix my voice tension problem, I think I’d be cured, (at least for practical purposes) by now.
One last tip. Since my 1st post I’ve started taking a 450mg valerian root capsule before bed. It’s a natural muscle relaxant, intended for insomniacs, but useful for us! I was amazed how effectively it relaxes your body the 1st time (I immediately forgot I’d taken it as my mind wandered, then noticed the relaxation and remembered, so I don’t think it’s placebo), although it’s not been so dramatic subsequently, still noticeable though. I don’t think it would have worked so well if my muscles had been tensed continuously for years without experiencing reriods of normality through the relaxation work I had already been doing though. Worth a try, and it’s cheap.
Hope this helps and good luck with your condition,
Greg
Thanks for sharing your story Greg. I wish I could learn to relax more (especially difficult to do when the economy is tanking!!). I think some people are more prone to tensing up than others, and are therefore more prone to RSI – hence leading to some medical theories that “it’s all in the mind”. It certainly could all be caused by mental/physical tension because at the start of my RSI condition I was anything but relaxed mentally due to job pressures and deadlines, and I was pounding out a heavy workload for 9 hrs a day with no breaks. Its only recently that I’ve discovered Yoga and meditation, and it’s one of the best natural ways to relax that I know of. Just wish I’d got into it sooner because i’ve now had this chronic condition for coming up to 13 years now and I’m uncertain whether it will ever leave me now no matter how relaxed I am.