Coping with RSI -- a field report

First up: disclaimer. I am a computer geek. Not a medical practitioner. If you have symptoms, go see a doctor, ok?

So, here I am typing - yes typing with my fingers! Back in February I wrote about the onset of my RSI. This article is by way of a follow-up.

Well, the good news is that I'm still typing and I have managed to get the general level of pain and discomfort down pretty significantly by making a variety of changes. The bad news is I'm not sure which change or indeed combination of changes has made the difference. In fact, I cannot be sure that any of the changes are involved in my apparent presence on the road to recovery at all!

Debugging, as any software engineer knows, is a tough problem owing to the difficulty of establishing repeatable causal connections between events. Debugging RSI is about the most complex problem I have ever tried to debug I think. All I can truthfully do is list the changes I have made, in the hope that some of them are actually involved in my improvement, and in the hope that they may be of use to other RSI sufferers.

Research: I have done a ton of this. I have read widely, even venturing into the dense thickets of medical papers, in an effort to get a handle on my problem. All the information gained has been useful but the overall result has been open ended so far.

In summary:

- this is complicated stuff because RSI is really just an umbrella term for many different ailments

- the medical world is very scientific and physical (and rightly so). Diagnosis starts with the measurement of effects and works back to causes. If your effects are troublesome to measure scientifically, it is tough to find medical practitioners who will even listen to you. I know from my reading about RSI, that this drives many sufferers nuts but, being a software engineer, I can see it from the medical professional's perspective.

If a user of one of my applications comes to me and says "sometimes it is hard to do X and sometimes Y seems to pop up out of nowhere and sometimes I feel as if all I can do is Z but the feeling goes away after a while..." I will likely tell them there is nothing I can do until they have a repeatable scenario for me to measure and diagnose.

The relatively benign possible outcome here is that your medical practitioner just tells you to "rest up". The significantly less benign outcome that seems common is a rush to diagnosis on the basis of some symptom or other. For example, pain in the carpal tunnel of the wrist. Tales abound on the Web of people who have had surgery or drug interventions that have addressed a symptom of RSI but not addressed the underlying cause. Oftentimes leaving the sufferer no better off physically and worse off financially.

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