Hacker News Reader

Comment by ericmcer | Hacker News Reader

I am a big believer in this, so far doing a form of trigger point therapy on myself and exercise/stretching has relieved all my nagging pains (right shoulder, right knee, both wrists).

It seems completely insane to me that you would have a painful wrist or knee and start a regiment of ibuprofen for it. Why would you suppress your bodies signals that something is wrong rather than trying to get your muscles, bones and tendons to work correctly and healthily together. It's like fixing your car by turning off the check engine light.

View on HN

Given the choice of "live with it" and having a wide and increasing array of palliatives to make living with it easier, or "suffer more exercise" that has at least a sunk time cost and isn't necessarily going to resolve the issue or reduce need of palliatives, is it that insane why someone would do the first?

I'm not anti-exercise (barbell squats are the only good thing for my knee that got out of whack from an elliptical) and think "so what's your plan?" when I hear excuses about weak X stopping people from even starting a progression system, but I don't think it's insane to make the tradeoff in favor of "living with it" and I've made that tradeoff myself at various points in life for various things besides body aches.

As an example, I would assume meds would start working noticably within hours whereas exercise is more of a long term thing.

However I am extremely interested in where you got your exercises from as my wrists have started to hurt and I want them to stop.

The internet is crazy full of resources for carpal tunnel relief. I just kept trying stuff until i found what worked.

My problem was a ton of tension/tightness in my forearm muscles that was leading to inflammation in the wrist making using mouse/keyboard pretty unbearable, even for browsing the internet. If you do some basic forearm/wrist stretching while probing the muscles for pain/tight feeling you will be able to tell if something is wrong.

I fixed it by doing a combination of stretching, rubbing really hard on the muscles, and pushing into the muscle while activating it. I would finish by holding my wrists in ice water. The whole routine took 10-15 minutes and after doing it for a weekish I was playing FPS games pain free.

> Why would you suppress your bodies signals that something is wrong

Because after so many years of living you realise your body is utter shit at sending the right signals.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com