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How I Cured my RSI Pain (2010)

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Re: How I Cured my RSI Pain (2010)

#21

Post by president »

xenophanes wrote: post #10

Never read the book, but psychology changes helped my RSI issues tremendously. > if you are unconsciously worried about something (including worried about your wrists hurting while you type), then this can cause your wrists to hurt while you type. This. If you're scared of RSI and scared of typing, that can itself cause problems.

> including worried about your wrists hurting while you type

This is the thing that fixed my problem. After trying so many different "methods" and "tricks", I read about this approach on an HN thread a few years ago. I was skeptical in the beginning but now I'm just dumbfounded how effective it was.

Re: How I Cured my RSI Pain (2010)

#22

Post by lunix »

lunix wrote: post #15

Claims to be sceptical but then: "The first medical specialist I consulted was a chiropractor" Chiropractic was founded by magnetic healer, D.D. Palmer. Magnetic healing is also a pseudoscience but less people take it seriously.

He also promotes this book:

http://www.amazon.com/4-Hour-Body-Uncommon-Incredible-Superh...

If you look at the reviews you'll get a better understanding.

Re: How I Cured my RSI Pain (2010)

#23

Post by akiselev »

sillysaurus wrote: post #20
Apes wrote: post #14

Please be careful with this article. It is not remotely skeptical, and seems to be highly biased in the favor of Dr. Sarno's book. Chiropractic medicine for anything other than lower back pain and Acupuncture are two forms of alternative medicine that are well known to work off the placebo effect, yet the article mentions their use despite alleging to be a skeptic. This is a major red flag. There is not a large amoun…

Chiropractic medicine for anything other than lower back pain and Acupuncture are two forms of alternative medicine that are well known to work off the placebo effect, yet the article mentions their use despite alleging to be a skeptic. This is a major red flag. Trying something to check whether it works is orthogonal to being skeptical about it. In fact, it's the heart of science.

Making very specific predictions via a hypothesis and gathering specific, and plentiful, data that test your predictions is the heart of science. Anecdotes (on which all alternative medicine is based on) do not make good science and "trying something to check whether it works" with a sample size of one is the worst way to do medicine.

Re: How I Cured my RSI Pain (2010)

#24

Post by bluemetal »

To anyone suffering significant hand, arm, neck & shoulder pain, I suggest you consider asking your doctor about Thoracic Outlet Syndrome. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoracic_outlet_syndrome)

I was diagnosed with bilateral arterial T.O.S. last year after reading about it in a comment on HN. I very recently had corrective surgery on my right side and I hope to have my left side done soon. I was diagnosed when an ultrasound showed full occlusion of my subclavian arteries whenever I lifted my arms (but only when sitting or standing upright, like at my desk, which was not a standard discovery).

If anyone has any questions feel free to message me.

Re: How I Cured my RSI Pain (2010)

#25

Post by bmcleod »

I suspect what's happening with all the people who this works for is that given there are some people who have a psychological component to their pain and some who have a mostly physical component.

Even if there are far fewer suffering from the psychological version, they are the ones who physical treatment will fail for. So they will be the ones that get as far as trying the pseudosciencey approach to dealing with the pain. So the mind body approach will have a high success rate amongst the people trying it even if it would be a terrible initial remedy to try.

Re: How I Cured my RSI Pain (2010)

#26

Post by huhtenberg »

Me too, not the RSI though.

I am generally as skeptical as it gets, but I read the book, then spent some time contemplating how it applied to my situation and - poof - a debilitating hip joint pain I had a mispleasure experiencing every few months was gone. I went through an MRI and a bone scan prior to that and all I got back was that everything was A-OK. Frankly, I was stunned that thinking about the problem was the remedy. You can basically talk to your body, say "stop that" and it will comply. Really weird.

Re: How I Cured my RSI Pain (2010)

#27

Post by smrtinsert »

I'm not selling this dvd, but even the 5 or so videos here really helped. http://www.youtube.com/user/HealthyTyping. It is very practical, showing how tendons are strained in positions that seem like they should be pain free.

Since then I don't use arm rests so I can keep my elbows in, and dont curl my fingers. The pain went away almost over one weekend.

Re: How I Cured my RSI Pain (2010)

#28

Post by domdip »

Pain treatment is one of the few areas where a placebo actually 'works' (in the sense that it leads to better outcomes than non-treatment). See Pollo et al, "Response expectancies in placebo analgesia and their clinical relevance."

So even if it's full of nonsense, it's not surprising that the book could work (and not just anecdotally). The question is whether this book is any better than a placebo, and anecdotes can't answer that. (I also wonder if it's any better than any other book that would help you cope with psychological stress.)

Re: How I Cured my RSI Pain (2010)

#29

Post by logn »

fabvanso wrote: post #13

This does not work at all. The causes behind RSI are physical and real.

Somewhere is the many paragraphs of typing he did for this article, he mentions that perhaps fixing the psychological component improves the physical condition. His idea is that mental stress over RSI restricts bloodflow to the parts of the hands/arms that need blood.

While I don't buy into this article's theory, I do think that the mind is tightly coupled to the body and that people who draw too many distinctions between the two are misguided. That said, I still seek out good ergonomics personally and think RSI, at least for me, is due to me typing for 12 hours a day. I never worried about RSI until I had pain in my hands the went on for weeks. We can debate until the cows come home about whether the mental stress caused the hand pain or whether the ergonomics caused it--in the end it's the same pain and same RSI and just semantics. If wearing wrist pads eliminates the pain or if telling yourself to not worry makes the pain go away--the physical and mental result is the same. For me, wristpads worked. But I know from experience that stress on the mind and stress on the body is basically the same in many regards.

Re: How I Cured my RSI Pain (2010)

#30

Post by eli »

I guess whatever works for you.

Personally, I was having problems in my dominant hand and switching from a mouse to a Wacom tablet with a pen made a colossal improvement.

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