The health care toll today’s work culture exacts on employees

Everything appears to be a liability these days - that is the problem.

I empathize. Had major trouble myself with the same. This is a run down of everything I tried to some positive effect:

* Hand, forearm, shoulder and neck massage. Weekly if need be. Don't discount problems in your shoulders causing issues in your wrists.

* Stopped using a single hand mouse, learned keyboard shortcuts. My RSI was worse on my mouse hand. The constant moving right hand off keyboard at 12 o'clock to 1 o'clock to click with mouse was a killer. Keeping hands centered and relatively immobile over keyboard helped.

* Bought my own office chair that fit me. I am short through the torso and chairs could never lift me high enough for me to avoid lifting elbows.

* Bought an ergonomic keyboard and mouse.

* Bought an ergonomic keyboard augment (kind of a tray that the keyboard sat upon, that had padded extensions under either side of my wrists) that kept my wrists off the edge of desk, edge of laptop, etc.)

* Every job I got, I brought my own chair and equipment and tossed whatever my employer provided.

* I had an ergonomics consultant come in and check my posture, desk, and chair set up.

As a heavy traveler, I'd really try the massage because you can get a massage in lots of locations. My shoulders were a great part of the problem.

Good luck.

Edit: I think I should also explain some of the difficulties I had with employers. Occasionally I got crap because I created an extra chair by bringing my own. I explained that I spent more time in my office chair than I did in my own bed, and I didn't purchase my bed by finding the cheapest mattress. Since I was in my chair more than my bed, I had even higher expectation of fit and comfort. If they had a problem with my asset being on their premise, they were free to buy the chair from me at my cost. Please see copies of medical bills which I'd be happy to claim as an expense.

The other issue I had was with IT. They would see all the nonstandard equipment and then say "we can't support X because of specialized keyboard or mouse". My response would be "I completely understand the needs of IT for support-ability. Please see copies of my medical bills for RSI and massage treatment. Please have IT procurement buy replacement equipment under IT's procurement control to ensure support-ability."

Both of these strategies proved successful with employers and the IT staff.

I can't speak for whether or not this behavior can be trained "out" but I can share what I have noticed and my own personal experiences.

On the part of people being trained, as I mentioned in another comment, I've seemed to notice that a lot of my Indian and Chinese coworkers, for probably cultural reasons, seem to have this sort of "respect the decisions of 'elders'" mentality and see it as extremely confrontational to disagree with decisions even if in their personal experience they know or have faith that it won't work.

My personal issue was always that I didn't actually know enough about my domain (distributed systems/"backend") to sometimes refute decisions that I had a gut feeling were bad (for example, never had seen anything like a proposed solution being done that way in the open source community or outside of our team -> red flags starting to go off), or that the people who were in my management chain or even more senior coworkers, would refuse to teach/mentor me or even point me toward the correct learning resources.

I ended up spending about 3 years of my free time outside of work learning as much as I could about these subjects (operating system internals, database engines, learning the network stack inside and out, distributed systems primitives, etc etc).

What did I find once I actually started questioning people based on this new knowledge I had? Not a lot of them actually knew what they were talking about. They either couldn't teach me because they themselves didn't know, or they were just afraid to say that they didn't know these things and didn't want to look "stupid".

Long story short, this was the "process" that personally made me extremely confident in being able to call people out on their bullshit since I actually had the means to defend myself objectively.

As a side note, going through this process of intense learning also made me realize that _most_ people don't know any of these things but like to talk as if they do, rather than just admit that they're not experts or unfamiliar with it...

If you are flooded with stress, I recommend Finnish sauna a few times a week with continuous adjustment to cold immersion after a few minutes you leave the hot area (try to stay in cold longer every next time until you hit 2 minutes). Try to repeat it 4-5x a session in like 90 minutes. After I started doing it, it usually clears my head completely and makes my evenings absolutely stress-free and happy, and I can tackle the most difficult tasks next day.

I'm afraid these better workplaces are relatively small and there is not much at stake at positions UP (and not even much room UP). Otherwise it would've attracted people who knows how to make workplace work "as expected" to ensure benefits for their level and up and to some extent for shareholders