September 23, 2008 at 18:56We wrote, we wrote, or what to do when we get tunnel syndrome
If you read these lines, it will be natural to assume that you spend at least a few hours a day at the computer, or even more. This mode of operation brings with it a fairly strong load on our hands, which can cause pain in the hands, wrists and fingers. Such pains are caused by the so-called "tunnel syndrome" (carpal tunnel syndrome, carpal tunnel syndrome, carpal tunnel syndrome) - a chronic disease.
In this article we will try to understand the causes of tunnel syndrome, possible treatment options and ways to prevent this undesirable phenomenon. This article will contain a lot of subjective deviations from the formal definitions and formulations that are available on various medical sites, because after spending a significant amount of time at the keyboard over the past eight years, I tasted the consequences of tunnel syndrome in all its manifestations.
So, what causes this unpleasant phenomenon? Carpal (tunnel) syndrome is caused by squeezing the nerve of the hand (median nerve), which passes in special channels formed by bones and ligaments. Naturally, when squeezing a nerve, we feel pain that can be felt in the joint of the hand, but not only in it. Now we will go through all the stages of the syndrome under discussion and try to connect the physiological processes with what we can feel when working at the computer.
According to personal experience, at first there is a slight dull pain, numbness or discomfort in the joint of the hand after several hours of work. If you interrupt the work and just stretch your hands, the pain disappears for half an hour - an hour. The unchanging crawl of the hand, coupled with intense work, leads to stagnation of blood, which at this stage causes only unpleasant sensations.
If you do nothing and continue to work as before, then in a year or two the next stage will come - a burning sensation in the hand, which appears by the end of the working day and no longer passes, as before, but continues to haunt us at home, two or three hours, passing gradually just into a dull, weak pain. This happens due to thickened tendons, which are already inflamed and begin to put pressure on the nerve (the diameter of the channel has decreased) with a problematic position of the arm. Around the same time, pain may appear in the hand itself (the outer side of the palm) and in the phalanges of the fingers, especially the index and middle, used most when working with the mouse.
In addition to all the pleasures of working behind a standard job, it becomes difficult to lift weights when the brush is in a certain position. Interestingly, the degree of pain does not depend on the severity of the load, but mainly only on the position of the arm. But we will not be distracted, we will go further.
In this position, our body will try to cope with an unfavorable situation, and between the cartilages lymphatic fluid begins to accumulate, designed to wash out the affected and inflamed cells. With the normal course of events, such a process reaches its goal (cells are washed out) and the liquid dissolves itself. If the load on the hands is long, then the inflammation, as you can already guess, does not stop, but quite the opposite. With this development of events, the natural treatment process itself can lead to the opposite result - swelling of the lymphatic fluid in the joints. From personal experience, again, you can determine with a high probability whether you have reached this stage or not. Lymphatic tides are most significant at night, so if the pain is worse at night, you have already arrived at the destination station.
Before we discuss inpatient medical treatment, let's first see what we can do on our own, reduce the healing of our body to physiotherapy, or in extreme cases, limit ourselves to outpatient treatment.
These exercises can / should be done every few hours, and each of them should be repeated many times, a dozen or two.
1. Strongly squeeze fingers into a fist and also unclench strongly.
2. Clench your fists and turn first in one direction, then in the opposite.
2a. You can perform the same exercise with a special ball, inside of which there is a rapidly rotating disk (for example, PowerBall or with any more or less heavy object). I had to try such a thing - it noticeably resists changing the position of the ball on any axis and thus trains the muscles and accelerates blood more, which, in fact, is what we are aiming for. You can rotate the hand not only along the axis of the elbow-wrist, as shown in the picture, but also completely bending the brush.
3. Clasping palms to each other, spread elbows to the sides, taking a position like a prayer. The forearms in this position are parallel to the floor. Then, try to lower your palms as low as possible, without opening them and leaving your elbows still high. It is likely that pain will be felt in the hands, in the palms, or even in the phalanges of the fingers, if the disease under discussion has already reached you. It is important not to leave your hands far away from you.
4. If you have a special soft ball (these are often given out as free gifts at various gatherings and presentations) for hands, squeeze it in turn with all fingers, a palm and between hands, as shown in the pictures.
5. Repeat the previous exercise, only without the ball, resisting with your thumb to all fingers in turn.
6. With your arms straight in front of you, as shown in the picture, rest your palm against your palm. When resisting, try to straighten a bent palm.
Like for now. Let's go further - what can be done at home if the pain is palpable at work, i.e. (see previous chapter) tendons are already sore.
The exercises that will be described here are a bit bordering on “real” physiotherapy, but please tell me, why do we need to wait for someone and something if we can help ourselves? So, let's start with the easiest, but again, from personal experience, the most effective.
1. Fill a deep bath with warm, almost hot, water and clenching your fists, slowly turn them in the water. It is important that the water warms the hands high enough, above the joint of the hand. This exercise significantly relieves pain in the initial stage and in progressive. The optimal duration for this exercise is 10-15 minutes, no less. At the end, wrap your hands, including brushes, in a towel - do not cool them quickly. If the apartment is cold enough, then even use a warm scarf.
2. Repeating the previous exercise to some extent, you can apply an alcohol warming compress at night, just do not make it strong, otherwise you will burn the skin on your hands - an unpleasant experience.
3. Massage. In a situation where the fingers and hands hurt from any effort, it will be difficult to massage oneself. Best of all ask someone, special skills are not required here, the main thing is desire. It is necessary to massage the entire arm, starting from the outside of the palm, continuing upward, the outer side of the forearm (trying to move in the middle of the arm, where there is a small depression between the forearms).
4. Regarding the advice in this paragraph, I can not say anything, neither for nor against, because I did not use this approach. If it helps you, it’s good, if it’s not there, then there’s nothing to worry about, water massage, namely it will be discussed now, does not carry anything destructive in itself. Hydromassage is offered as a treatment on some sites dedicated to this issue, and it is proposed to use it twice a day - in the morning (cool and warm water) for massaging the collar of the back, shoulder blades, shoulders, forearms and hands, and in the evening (only with warm water) in the same way.
We are beginning to slowly cross the border of self-treatment and outpatient treatment, since physiotherapy, although it is not some kind of active treatment, at least in my opinion, is nevertheless prescribed by a doctor and the course of physiotherapy should be fully completed to achieve any sane result. Everything that will be described in this chapter should not be taken as a recommended course of treatment, and all the more I hope that everyone understands that my personal experience in no way replaces a full-fledged prescription of a doctor, a specialist in this matter, and responsible for the result thereof .
1. Again ... massage. Yes, as one of the means, physiotherapy will offer you massage again. I don’t know how much his location (in the office or at home) affects the quality of the massage; he helped me a little in both the first and second cases.
2. Warming paraffin baths. Remember the first item of home exercise? This is almost the same, only instead of hot water you will be offered to dip your hands in hot paraffin and after two or three dips they will wrap your hands in a warm towel. The result will be the same - the joint and tendons warm up, only here your hands will look like big ritual candles. There is nothing terrible in this, on the contrary, it is funny to take such casts of hands on a scale of 1: 1 later.
3. Short-wave heating. In this type of treatment, the joints of the hand are heated by radiation in the range of several giga-hertz (if I remember everything correctly). I did not like such a thing and I refused after one session. The personal microwave in my hands did not seem to me to be particularly useful, and deep heating can be achieved at home.
4. Exercises for the muscles of the arms and back. Sometimes the discussed disease can occur due to improper posture during work, so as one of the options for physiotherapy you can offer simple physical exercises, it all depends on your physique and posture. Since the proposed exercises are quite simple, there is little point in describing them in detail. Yes, in my opinion, this item is quite a candidate for transferring to the previous chapter - you can certainly wave light dumbbells and stretch elastic at home.
Unfortunately, although it is most likely the other way around, I can not share my personal experience in the matter of inpatient treatment. As far as I know, with edema of lymphatic fluid, doctors suggest a puncture - an operation to extract excess fluid. To me personally, this does not seem to be a 100% correct approach, since the consequences are eliminated, not the original reason. In very advanced cases, when the cartilage of the joint was damaged or destroyed, various medications are offered, but this certainly requires examination by a specialist, so our discussion of inpatient treatment will end here.
We could not call ourselves geeks if we had a pair of labeled aces in our sleeves that would help us solve such problems, right? Well, if so, then it's time to discuss and tell what kind of gadgets save us in this position.
The easiest and most effective way to solve a problem is to not face it. The easiest way, well-known today, is a pad under the brush. Most often gel pads are used and, it should be noted that even the cheapest of them do their job perfectly, straightening our joint of the hand as far as possible.
So wrong.
And so right.
But let's move on to more serious devices, and we will start with keyboard modifications.
To date, there are three types of conventional ergonomic keyboards available:
- flat with arched buttons, such as Microsoft Comfort Curve 2000
- flat, arched, separated (“broken”) for the right and left hands separately, such as Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000
- vertically curved, arched, such as Microsoft Natural Multimedia or Microsoft Natural Keyboard Elite . Beware, however, of keyboards that are too curved in the vertical plane - it becomes completely inconvenient to work on them.
According to personal experience, the latter type is clearly preferable - the hand is in a more natural position. We will discuss the question of the natural position of the hand in more detail in the chapter on substitute mice, but for now let us leave this statement at the level of a temporary axiom.
In addition to the above, there are a number of “unusual” ergonomic keyboards, which I probably would even classify as exotic:
- adjustable split (physically into two halves) keyboard, such asKinesis Maxim Adjustable Keyboard
- Separate, concave down keyboard, such as Kinesis Ergonomic Contoured Keyboard or Maltron Two Handed Keyboard . I read a few rave reviews about such keyboards, but nothing more. Neither my personal experience of using it, nor the experience of my inner circle, I can share with you, my dear readers, so the advisability of using such devices will remain in question for now, especially since the price of such a thing is quite high - about $ 300- $ 600.
Regarding ordinary mice, you can briefly give very few recommendations. Firstly, the mouse should not be small in order to have to hold it by straining the thumb and little finger, and secondly, it is desirable that the mouse be tall enough to support the inside of the palm, so that the latter does not hang all the time. A little moving away from the topic of the mice themselves, it's time to find out why the position of the hand when working with the mouse is problematic.
According to personal observations, which are partially confirmed by various publications that caught my eye, the natural position of the hand and wrist when we stand at 45 degrees to our hips is not completely parallel to them, as well as not perpendicular. If you try to just get up and freely lower your hands, they will take just that position.
Now, still standing, we’ll do a very simple action - we will bend our elbows, keeping our arms as relaxed as possible. Note that the wrists and wrists that were at an angle to our body now maintain the same angle to a horizontal surface. If you turn the brushes along the longitudinal axis of the hands, so that the latter take a horizontal position, the bones of the forearm will not be parallel, as before.
Also, our muscles and tendons will be used for lshem voltage than before. Note that it is in this position that our hands are when working with ordinary mice - this is the first of two reasons for the distress of our hands after an N-th number of years of continuous work. About the second reason regarding the position of the fingers, we will talk a little lower.
Well, now the fun begins. Let's see what exactly we can replace these friendly-hostile tailed creatures with.
There is a rather unusual type of mouse that tries to maintain the natural position of the hand and wrist in a horizontal position, offering to turn not our hands to the plane of the mouse, but the plane of the mouse to the position of our hands.
From personal experience, working with such a mouse eases the load on the mouse-holding hand and I can say that at least one of my colleagues such a mouse helped to get rid of wrist pain at the initial level of the inflammatory process.
Another type of vertical mouse offers an even more unusual approach, not only turning the mouse to the plane of the hand, but also replacing all movements with the brush with the movements of the entire forearm.
Based on my own experience, I can notice that although working with such a mouse improves the position of the wrist, on the other hand it makes our whole hand move to move the cursor. In this situation, the load on the shoulder and associated muscles increases, which negatively affects the entire work process. I could not work with such a device precisely because of the intense load on the shoulder, but I know one person who considers such a manipulator the most correct alternative to a normal mouse.
On sale you can find two types of trackballs - with a ball under the thumb and a ball under the index, middle and nameless.
Having tried one and the other, I can not recommend any of them. Why, you ask. The answer is simple. When working with trackballs, the problematic position of the wrist on the table does not disappear, and the load on the fingers simply changes. In the first case, the thumb will be heavily loaded, in the second, all movements and clicks will be made with straightened fingers, which, as already mentioned, is often one of the components of our big problem.
If we return for a moment to the question of the natural position of the hand at the table, then the only mouse-replacement gadget that will not contradict the principles described above will be found in ... designers. It is this cohort of people who uses graphic tablets on which virtually everything that needs to be transferred to the screen is virtually drawn with a wireless “pencil”. If you look closely, then in a sitting position, the hand when working with such a stylus just repeats the free state of the hand and palm - not parallel and not perpendicular to the body, but about 45 degrees to the table surface. In addition, our fingers holding the stylus are not fully extended, as when working with a regular or vertical mouse, but are in a half-bent state and, therefore, put up the effort to acquire in a less stressed position.
It will be useful to add that the most frequent action of the left “click” is replaced when working with the stylus by clicking on its virtual rod (pressing with the whole hand towards the tablet), bringing additional relief to our long-suffering hands. The right click is made by pressing the stylus button located under the thumb, thus freeing the middle finger from the load.
Returning again and again to a bitter personal experience, I can notice that working with such a device can stop the pain in the wrist and fingers almost instantly.
If you don’t have the opportunity to change the mouse / keyboard to one of the ergonomic solutions described above, you can use the half-hearted approach - try to maintain the correct position of the hand when working with the wrong device. Correct arm position can be achieved with an elastic medical bandage supporting the wrist and wrist. Not every dressing will be useful to us, but only containing a rigid or springy metal element.
Dressing with a rigid element.
Dressing with a springy element.
From experience, it is quite convenient to work with both extensions of the dressings, unless the first option provides less freedom of the hand, which, however, is hardly a drawback for our case. An example of such Uriel dressings can be seen here.and here .
Such a solution can be recommended to those who are forced, for one reason or another, to continue working with the mouse and cannot change this input device to a more correct and safe for health.
As another solution to replace the mouse, you can mention an external touchpad (usually USB). Such a device, although it can to some extent be an alternative solution, but according to the experience of working on a laptop, it is not effective enough. Despite the fact that hand movements will be limited, the position of the wrist on the table will still be problematic, and the fingers will be tense for tracking.
In conclusion, only one very simple truth can be said - take care of yourself. No one will ever know and feel what exactly is happening to you day by day. If you feel that a problem occurs during operation, do not ignore it. The sooner you deal with its solution, the less blood you will cost, since I tried to describe most of the possible solutions and procedures in sufficient detail, but simply and without unnecessarily tiring details.
I don’t know how to correctly end such a long story, so I just hope that everything described above will help you in one way or another. Bye.
In this article we will try to understand the causes of tunnel syndrome, possible treatment options and ways to prevent this undesirable phenomenon. This article will contain a lot of subjective deviations from the formal definitions and formulations that are available on various medical sites, because after spending a significant amount of time at the keyboard over the past eight years, I tasted the consequences of tunnel syndrome in all its manifestations.
How does tunnel syndrome develop and how do we feel
So, what causes this unpleasant phenomenon? Carpal (tunnel) syndrome is caused by squeezing the nerve of the hand (median nerve), which passes in special channels formed by bones and ligaments. Naturally, when squeezing a nerve, we feel pain that can be felt in the joint of the hand, but not only in it. Now we will go through all the stages of the syndrome under discussion and try to connect the physiological processes with what we can feel when working at the computer.
According to personal experience, at first there is a slight dull pain, numbness or discomfort in the joint of the hand after several hours of work. If you interrupt the work and just stretch your hands, the pain disappears for half an hour - an hour. The unchanging crawl of the hand, coupled with intense work, leads to stagnation of blood, which at this stage causes only unpleasant sensations.
If you do nothing and continue to work as before, then in a year or two the next stage will come - a burning sensation in the hand, which appears by the end of the working day and no longer passes, as before, but continues to haunt us at home, two or three hours, passing gradually just into a dull, weak pain. This happens due to thickened tendons, which are already inflamed and begin to put pressure on the nerve (the diameter of the channel has decreased) with a problematic position of the arm. Around the same time, pain may appear in the hand itself (the outer side of the palm) and in the phalanges of the fingers, especially the index and middle, used most when working with the mouse.
In addition to all the pleasures of working behind a standard job, it becomes difficult to lift weights when the brush is in a certain position. Interestingly, the degree of pain does not depend on the severity of the load, but mainly only on the position of the arm. But we will not be distracted, we will go further.
In this position, our body will try to cope with an unfavorable situation, and between the cartilages lymphatic fluid begins to accumulate, designed to wash out the affected and inflamed cells. With the normal course of events, such a process reaches its goal (cells are washed out) and the liquid dissolves itself. If the load on the hands is long, then the inflammation, as you can already guess, does not stop, but quite the opposite. With this development of events, the natural treatment process itself can lead to the opposite result - swelling of the lymphatic fluid in the joints. From personal experience, again, you can determine with a high probability whether you have reached this stage or not. Lymphatic tides are most significant at night, so if the pain is worse at night, you have already arrived at the destination station.
Before we discuss inpatient medical treatment, let's first see what we can do on our own, reduce the healing of our body to physiotherapy, or in extreme cases, limit ourselves to outpatient treatment.
Tunnel Syndrome Prevention Exercises
These exercises can / should be done every few hours, and each of them should be repeated many times, a dozen or two.
1. Strongly squeeze fingers into a fist and also unclench strongly.
2. Clench your fists and turn first in one direction, then in the opposite.
2a. You can perform the same exercise with a special ball, inside of which there is a rapidly rotating disk (for example, PowerBall or with any more or less heavy object). I had to try such a thing - it noticeably resists changing the position of the ball on any axis and thus trains the muscles and accelerates blood more, which, in fact, is what we are aiming for. You can rotate the hand not only along the axis of the elbow-wrist, as shown in the picture, but also completely bending the brush.
3. Clasping palms to each other, spread elbows to the sides, taking a position like a prayer. The forearms in this position are parallel to the floor. Then, try to lower your palms as low as possible, without opening them and leaving your elbows still high. It is likely that pain will be felt in the hands, in the palms, or even in the phalanges of the fingers, if the disease under discussion has already reached you. It is important not to leave your hands far away from you.
4. If you have a special soft ball (these are often given out as free gifts at various gatherings and presentations) for hands, squeeze it in turn with all fingers, a palm and between hands, as shown in the pictures.
5. Repeat the previous exercise, only without the ball, resisting with your thumb to all fingers in turn.
6. With your arms straight in front of you, as shown in the picture, rest your palm against your palm. When resisting, try to straighten a bent palm.
Like for now. Let's go further - what can be done at home if the pain is palpable at work, i.e. (see previous chapter) tendons are already sore.
Exercises for treating tunnel syndrome at home
The exercises that will be described here are a bit bordering on “real” physiotherapy, but please tell me, why do we need to wait for someone and something if we can help ourselves? So, let's start with the easiest, but again, from personal experience, the most effective.
1. Fill a deep bath with warm, almost hot, water and clenching your fists, slowly turn them in the water. It is important that the water warms the hands high enough, above the joint of the hand. This exercise significantly relieves pain in the initial stage and in progressive. The optimal duration for this exercise is 10-15 minutes, no less. At the end, wrap your hands, including brushes, in a towel - do not cool them quickly. If the apartment is cold enough, then even use a warm scarf.
2. Repeating the previous exercise to some extent, you can apply an alcohol warming compress at night, just do not make it strong, otherwise you will burn the skin on your hands - an unpleasant experience.
3. Massage. In a situation where the fingers and hands hurt from any effort, it will be difficult to massage oneself. Best of all ask someone, special skills are not required here, the main thing is desire. It is necessary to massage the entire arm, starting from the outside of the palm, continuing upward, the outer side of the forearm (trying to move in the middle of the arm, where there is a small depression between the forearms).
4. Regarding the advice in this paragraph, I can not say anything, neither for nor against, because I did not use this approach. If it helps you, it’s good, if it’s not there, then there’s nothing to worry about, water massage, namely it will be discussed now, does not carry anything destructive in itself. Hydromassage is offered as a treatment on some sites dedicated to this issue, and it is proposed to use it twice a day - in the morning (cool and warm water) for massaging the collar of the back, shoulder blades, shoulders, forearms and hands, and in the evening (only with warm water) in the same way.
Physiotherapy exercises for the treatment of tunnel syndrome
We are beginning to slowly cross the border of self-treatment and outpatient treatment, since physiotherapy, although it is not some kind of active treatment, at least in my opinion, is nevertheless prescribed by a doctor and the course of physiotherapy should be fully completed to achieve any sane result. Everything that will be described in this chapter should not be taken as a recommended course of treatment, and all the more I hope that everyone understands that my personal experience in no way replaces a full-fledged prescription of a doctor, a specialist in this matter, and responsible for the result thereof .
1. Again ... massage. Yes, as one of the means, physiotherapy will offer you massage again. I don’t know how much his location (in the office or at home) affects the quality of the massage; he helped me a little in both the first and second cases.
2. Warming paraffin baths. Remember the first item of home exercise? This is almost the same, only instead of hot water you will be offered to dip your hands in hot paraffin and after two or three dips they will wrap your hands in a warm towel. The result will be the same - the joint and tendons warm up, only here your hands will look like big ritual candles. There is nothing terrible in this, on the contrary, it is funny to take such casts of hands on a scale of 1: 1 later.
3. Short-wave heating. In this type of treatment, the joints of the hand are heated by radiation in the range of several giga-hertz (if I remember everything correctly). I did not like such a thing and I refused after one session. The personal microwave in my hands did not seem to me to be particularly useful, and deep heating can be achieved at home.
4. Exercises for the muscles of the arms and back. Sometimes the discussed disease can occur due to improper posture during work, so as one of the options for physiotherapy you can offer simple physical exercises, it all depends on your physique and posture. Since the proposed exercises are quite simple, there is little point in describing them in detail. Yes, in my opinion, this item is quite a candidate for transferring to the previous chapter - you can certainly wave light dumbbells and stretch elastic at home.
Hospital treatment
Unfortunately, although it is most likely the other way around, I can not share my personal experience in the matter of inpatient treatment. As far as I know, with edema of lymphatic fluid, doctors suggest a puncture - an operation to extract excess fluid. To me personally, this does not seem to be a 100% correct approach, since the consequences are eliminated, not the original reason. In very advanced cases, when the cartilage of the joint was damaged or destroyed, various medications are offered, but this certainly requires examination by a specialist, so our discussion of inpatient treatment will end here.
Gadgets saving us
We could not call ourselves geeks if we had a pair of labeled aces in our sleeves that would help us solve such problems, right? Well, if so, then it's time to discuss and tell what kind of gadgets save us in this position.
Preventive
The easiest and most effective way to solve a problem is to not face it. The easiest way, well-known today, is a pad under the brush. Most often gel pads are used and, it should be noted that even the cheapest of them do their job perfectly, straightening our joint of the hand as far as possible.
So wrong.
And so right.
But let's move on to more serious devices, and we will start with keyboard modifications.
Ergonomic (Natural) Keyboard
To date, there are three types of conventional ergonomic keyboards available:
- flat with arched buttons, such as Microsoft Comfort Curve 2000
- flat, arched, separated (“broken”) for the right and left hands separately, such as Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000
- vertically curved, arched, such as Microsoft Natural Multimedia or Microsoft Natural Keyboard Elite . Beware, however, of keyboards that are too curved in the vertical plane - it becomes completely inconvenient to work on them.
According to personal experience, the latter type is clearly preferable - the hand is in a more natural position. We will discuss the question of the natural position of the hand in more detail in the chapter on substitute mice, but for now let us leave this statement at the level of a temporary axiom.
In addition to the above, there are a number of “unusual” ergonomic keyboards, which I probably would even classify as exotic:
- adjustable split (physically into two halves) keyboard, such asKinesis Maxim Adjustable Keyboard
- Separate, concave down keyboard, such as Kinesis Ergonomic Contoured Keyboard or Maltron Two Handed Keyboard . I read a few rave reviews about such keyboards, but nothing more. Neither my personal experience of using it, nor the experience of my inner circle, I can share with you, my dear readers, so the advisability of using such devices will remain in question for now, especially since the price of such a thing is quite high - about $ 300- $ 600.
Mice and mouse-like
Regarding ordinary mice, you can briefly give very few recommendations. Firstly, the mouse should not be small in order to have to hold it by straining the thumb and little finger, and secondly, it is desirable that the mouse be tall enough to support the inside of the palm, so that the latter does not hang all the time. A little moving away from the topic of the mice themselves, it's time to find out why the position of the hand when working with the mouse is problematic.
According to personal observations, which are partially confirmed by various publications that caught my eye, the natural position of the hand and wrist when we stand at 45 degrees to our hips is not completely parallel to them, as well as not perpendicular. If you try to just get up and freely lower your hands, they will take just that position.
Now, still standing, we’ll do a very simple action - we will bend our elbows, keeping our arms as relaxed as possible. Note that the wrists and wrists that were at an angle to our body now maintain the same angle to a horizontal surface. If you turn the brushes along the longitudinal axis of the hands, so that the latter take a horizontal position, the bones of the forearm will not be parallel, as before.
Also, our muscles and tendons will be used for lshem voltage than before. Note that it is in this position that our hands are when working with ordinary mice - this is the first of two reasons for the distress of our hands after an N-th number of years of continuous work. About the second reason regarding the position of the fingers, we will talk a little lower.
Well, now the fun begins. Let's see what exactly we can replace these friendly-hostile tailed creatures with.
Vertical mice - 1
There is a rather unusual type of mouse that tries to maintain the natural position of the hand and wrist in a horizontal position, offering to turn not our hands to the plane of the mouse, but the plane of the mouse to the position of our hands. From personal experience, working with such a mouse eases the load on the mouse-holding hand and I can say that at least one of my colleagues such a mouse helped to get rid of wrist pain at the initial level of the inflammatory process.
Vertical mice -2
Another type of vertical mouse offers an even more unusual approach, not only turning the mouse to the plane of the hand, but also replacing all movements with the brush with the movements of the entire forearm.
Based on my own experience, I can notice that although working with such a mouse improves the position of the wrist, on the other hand it makes our whole hand move to move the cursor. In this situation, the load on the shoulder and associated muscles increases, which negatively affects the entire work process. I could not work with such a device precisely because of the intense load on the shoulder, but I know one person who considers such a manipulator the most correct alternative to a normal mouse.Cat Mice: Trackballs
On sale you can find two types of trackballs - with a ball under the thumb and a ball under the index, middle and nameless.
Having tried one and the other, I can not recommend any of them. Why, you ask. The answer is simple. When working with trackballs, the problematic position of the wrist on the table does not disappear, and the load on the fingers simply changes. In the first case, the thumb will be heavily loaded, in the second, all movements and clicks will be made with straightened fingers, which, as already mentioned, is often one of the components of our big problem.
Anti-mice: Virtual pencils / graphics tablets
If we return for a moment to the question of the natural position of the hand at the table, then the only mouse-replacement gadget that will not contradict the principles described above will be found in ... designers. It is this cohort of people who uses graphic tablets on which virtually everything that needs to be transferred to the screen is virtually drawn with a wireless “pencil”. If you look closely, then in a sitting position, the hand when working with such a stylus just repeats the free state of the hand and palm - not parallel and not perpendicular to the body, but about 45 degrees to the table surface. In addition, our fingers holding the stylus are not fully extended, as when working with a regular or vertical mouse, but are in a half-bent state and, therefore, put up the effort to acquire in a less stressed position.It will be useful to add that the most frequent action of the left “click” is replaced when working with the stylus by clicking on its virtual rod (pressing with the whole hand towards the tablet), bringing additional relief to our long-suffering hands. The right click is made by pressing the stylus button located under the thumb, thus freeing the middle finger from the load.
Returning again and again to a bitter personal experience, I can notice that working with such a device can stop the pain in the wrist and fingers almost instantly.
Semi-medical solutions: elastic dressings
If you don’t have the opportunity to change the mouse / keyboard to one of the ergonomic solutions described above, you can use the half-hearted approach - try to maintain the correct position of the hand when working with the wrong device. Correct arm position can be achieved with an elastic medical bandage supporting the wrist and wrist. Not every dressing will be useful to us, but only containing a rigid or springy metal element.
Dressing with a rigid element.
Dressing with a springy element.
From experience, it is quite convenient to work with both extensions of the dressings, unless the first option provides less freedom of the hand, which, however, is hardly a drawback for our case. An example of such Uriel dressings can be seen here.and here .
Such a solution can be recommended to those who are forced, for one reason or another, to continue working with the mouse and cannot change this input device to a more correct and safe for health.
Touchpad as another solution
As another solution to replace the mouse, you can mention an external touchpad (usually USB). Such a device, although it can to some extent be an alternative solution, but according to the experience of working on a laptop, it is not effective enough. Despite the fact that hand movements will be limited, the position of the wrist on the table will still be problematic, and the fingers will be tense for tracking.
Conclusion
In conclusion, only one very simple truth can be said - take care of yourself. No one will ever know and feel what exactly is happening to you day by day. If you feel that a problem occurs during operation, do not ignore it. The sooner you deal with its solution, the less blood you will cost, since I tried to describe most of the possible solutions and procedures in sufficient detail, but simply and without unnecessarily tiring details.
I don’t know how to correctly end such a long story, so I just hope that everything described above will help you in one way or another. Bye.