RSI and Mouse Technique
Are your mouse buttons are too hard to depress? Do the buttons cause tendon pain? Do your wrist hurts from moving the mouse? Save your money. You don't need to buy a new fangled mouse.
Treatment for any RSI must incorporate movement reeducation. If you move properly, you won't continue to damage your body, giving it time to heal. Often, the body's structural balance is endangered at the computer desk: the chair is too high or low, or the keyboard and mouse are out of comfortable reach, or your alignment is placing incoordinate stress on the soft tissues. Once injury occurs, there is a greater danger of misalignment and incoordinate movements that can cause other musculoskeletal threats to occur, causing more symptoms and possibly permanent damage done to the body.
Improper chair or desk height can cause carpal tunnel or tendon problems. If your chair is too high, you may bend your wrists down (dorsiflexion), or even slouch. If too low, you may arch your wrists up or raise your shoulders. A good analogy against bending your wrists can be found on page 26 of Dr. Emil Pascarelli's book, "Repetitive Strain Injury: A Computer Users Guide."
To find your proper height, sit up straight with your arms to your sides. Make sure your shoulders are relaxed. Bring your hands to your keyboard or mouse by bending them at the elbow. Your hands should be right where they need to be without having to stretch, reach, slouch, bending your wrists or raising your shoulders. The bottom of your forearm should be the same height of the keyboard or over the mouse. At no time should you ever be resting your arms or hands on the table, a wrist rest or your mouse. That is what you lap is for. Try it. What is more natural and comfortable? Take careful note of the gravitational pull on your body and the amount of weight that is pressing on your median nerve while resting on a wrist rest or the desk top. You'll agree that the lap is more ergonomically designed for resting your hands. Use it.
Mouse movements need not be sweeping circuitous movements, but, they must never be from an isolated wrist while the rest of the arm is motionless or resting on the desk (look up ulnar deviation and radial deviation). Keep in mind how you would write on a chalk board with a straight wrist. Don't break the wrist fulcrum by bending and twisting it.
Many people find that keyboard and mice buttons are too stiff and heavy to depress. It is true, they are. But you don't (and should not) have to be using your muscles to depress the keys when you can use gravity. It takes about two ounces to depress a key. Train your forearm to drop two ounces of weight and the key will go down effortlessly. NEVER press or leave your dead weight on a key. Work at finding the right amount of gravity and opposing muscles to find the happy medium. In other words, reeducate your body. Work! Nothing is easy, but it can be.
For clicking the mouse, the same concept is true, except, the mouse is poorly designed, and most people depress the buttons with their fingers flat. Learn to gently hold and hover your hand over the mouse, then forward shift into the button with the fleshy tip of your finger. Again, the weight of the forearm and the forward movement depresses the button, not the flexor tendon and muscle which was not designed for such misuse.
If your are too lazy to reeducate your body, are in too much pain, or, want to avoid using the mouse as much as possible, there is a great little program called AUTOCLIK which will click, double click, drag, scroll or left click for you. It takes a little practice to get used to it, but once you do, you will never want to mouse without it. The registration fee for AUTOCLIK is $40. When registering, if you mention that you were referred from this webpage, you may purchase it for $30. Click on AUTOCLIK to download the demo.
Happy Mousing!
Do: Gently cup the mouse in your hand. Don't: Grip, squeeze or clench the mouse in your hand.
Do: Rest your hands in your lap when not using them. Don't: Allow your hand and arm to hang or lay on the table or rest your hand on the mouse.
Do: Move your whole arm as if writing on a chalk board. Don't: Rest your arm on the table and move the mouse from your wrist.
Do: Use the weight of your forearm to depress the mouse buttons from your fingertip. Don't: Isolate your poor, flat, single flexor tendon to depress the buttons.
Do: Take frequent breaks. Don't: Static load for hours.
Questions? Comments? Concerns?