What is Repetitive Strain Injury RSI?
Introduction to RSI
In medical terms, RSI (repetitive strain injury) can be defined as CTD, cumulative trauma disorder resulting from protracted repetitive, awkward or forceful hand movements. The ultimate result is that it injures tendons, muscles, neck nerves, hand, forearm and shoulders which in turn can cause numbness, pain, weakness or mutilation of motor control. It is really amazing to observe that how apparently inoffensive activities like clicking with mouse and typing could ever prove detrimental. Fine movement of hands repeated day after day ultimately damages the tendons and muscles of fingers, wrists and forearms resulting microscopic tears. Damaged muscles tend to contract as the time passes by which eventually lowers down the motion required for doing work. Actually, the casing that covers fragile tendons falls short of lubrication because it did not find enough time to rest, thus resulting in unbearable pain.
Risk factors of RSI
Three major factors that are responsible for the problem of repetitive strain injury are overuse, poor technique and bad posture. Here is given a list of some other risk factors, if you have been doing any of them, then you might be developing the risk of RSI for you.
- Using computer for more than four hours in a day with wrong sitting posture
- Not exercising daily despite of job profile that requires constant usage of computer.
- Working in high pressure environment
- Keeping fingernail long and having other serious ailments like diabetes, carpal tunnel syndrome and arthritis.
- Living a sedentary, stressful and unhealthy lifestyle
- Heavy weight
- Insufficient sleep
- Not taking regular breaks while working on computer
In case, if any individual has developed the problem of repetitive strain injury, then it is suggested by expert doctors that one should be prepared to make changes in his/her lifestyle and also in computer using habits.
Finding an appropriate therapist or doctor
It is really a challenge to find out some competent doctor to identify and treat RSI because some therapists even doubt on the subsistence of this ailment while some others call it an unimportant problem. Some doctors are also there who motivate their patients to opt for unnecessary surgeries for a quick fix. So, one should keep all these things in mind whenever going for selecting an appropriate doctor.
For preventing the wastage of both time and money, one should exercise regularity and should rest as much as possible to get rid of this problem.