Mouse disease of an avid computer geek

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"Mouse" disease of an avid computer geek

“My arms are just falling off!” - complains the manager who spent the day at the computer. While scientists are deciding whether to classify “carpal tunnel syndrome” as an occupational disease for computer scientists, ordinary users are buying ergonomic mouse pads and sounding the alarm on medical blogs.

The former editor-in-chief of the medical Internet site MedNews, Alexei Vodovozov, became left-handed a year ago: problems arose with his wrist and his right hand had to be “torn to pieces” by doctors. “There was no surgery, but the course of treatment lasted for three months, including physiotherapy and exercise therapy,” recalls Alexey. — At first I worked at the computer with one left hand, then I came up with the idea of ​​fixing the sore joint with a bowling glove - there is a steel plate just above the wrist. Now the worst is over, but your hands still sometimes get “naughty” when you exceed a certain load limit.”

Just ten years ago, mostly professional musicians and experienced drivers complained about wrist problems. Today they are joined by programmers, web designers, system administrators, gamers and managers who spend most of their working time at the computer.

The wrist is pressed to the table, the mouse is in the palm, the fingers spend hours making monotonous movements barely noticeable to the eye - right button, left button, scroll... Sound familiar? This is a direct path to carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS). It is also known as carpal tunnel syndrome, which has already been popularly dubbed “mouse bite.”

Carpal tunnel syndrome is better prevented than cured. Because the matter may end in surgery. Meanwhile, there are basic methods of prevention.

Simple movements

Recognizing a mouse bite is easy. If, for no apparent reason, your right arm starts to hurt in the place where you usually feel the pulse. If in the morning three fingers are numb and difficult to obey: the middle, thumb and index. If your wrist is swollen, don't go to a fortune teller - it's him!

At first, the unpleasant sensations are mild, so a person can attribute them to a banal bruise or sprain for a long time. Feeling that something is wrong with his right hand, the manager thinks: “I must have injured a ligament last weekend when I was playing golf for the company championship.” But the pain does not subside, but only intensifies. This means that it is not the golf club that is to blame, but the computer mouse.

To understand what is happening with the sore hand of an office worker, imagine that we looked inside his wrist. Here in front of us is a groove, bounded on three sides by bones, and on the fourth by a wide transverse ligament. It, like an elastic cuff, covers the carpal tunnel from the flexor surface. Inside this tunnel are the median nerve and tendons of the hand muscles.

In patients with a mouse bite, the cuff ligament is thickened, and, consequently, the carpal tunnel is narrowed and the nerve passing through it is compressed. Hence the numbness of the fingers. In conditions of total tightness, the tendons, which by their nature are an order of magnitude more mobile than the nerve, also suffer. They rub against each other, become inflamed and hurt. This is the sad result of the computer load on your hands.

And respected managers and web designers have no one to blame but themselves and their work. Western doctors, so that patients would not doubt the cause of their illness, even came up with a “talking” term - RSI (repetitive strain injury) - “chronic injury from repeated stress.”

Emil Pasquarelli himself, a well-known specialist in RSI from Columbia University (USA), is confident that this syndrome can be considered an industrial injury.

It's not all sad though. After all, not everyone who sits at a computer for days starts to have pain in their hands. A healthy body is not afraid of any mouse. And all you need is nothing: normal metabolism and hormonal levels, ideal joints and the absence of genetic