I always thought that the Magic Mouse was really the ideal technology for interacting with a Mac--just too bad that it's so unergonomic. I can't prove it, but I blame a decade of Magic Mouse use for my very painful RSI, which I now have the pleasure of experiencing using any mouse at all.
Apple's input devices are beautiful, but they totally blow comfort. It's as if their industrial designers are all in their early 20s and have never experienced joint pain.
The solution for me was to switch to a vertical mouse (well, almost) that allows the wrist to remain neutral. Because I missed the gestures I added a Magic Trackpad on the left side of my keyboard. Of course this suffers from the same ergonomic problem but I only reach for it sporadically so the impact is minimal.
This is why a lot of what PT’s do is teach you simple exercises to work ALL of your muscles, including those that might not get activated in our day to day existence, leading to problems.
From personal experience: if you have mild pain from past injury/strain, don't give up on trying to fix it. Move a lot, improve your muscle strength and try to stimulate circulation. Be careful not to repeat the injury, but don't avoid the pain altogether (eg. by reducing the amount of movement). It's possible that the pain will improve or disappear, even if your injury didn't heal by itself for years.
(Oh, and go see a physiotherapist a couple of times if you haven't already.)
I use my fingers on keyboards all day long. Body adapts and grows stronger with use, it doesn’t get more and more vulnerable. After I realized this it went away. Now I can use them 15h/day with 4.5h/day sleep with no problems.
It got bad enough I opted for cortisone injections.
This was about 10 years ago. I’ve avoided Apple’s input devices since, opting for proper ergonomic keyboards and mice, with no further RSI thankfully.
Riddle me this: My wife loves the hockeypuck mouse. The only thing that remains of her Tangerine iMac is its orange hockeypuck; I bought her a USBA-to-USBC dongle so she can use it with her MacBook Air.
Fortunately, she uses her computer infrequently enough to be relatively unaffected by RSI issues, so that may have something to do with it.
2. For the longest time I stopped using a mouse to alleviate RSI. Started using a Wacom tablet as a touchpad with my non-mouse hand.
3. A vertical mouse design allowed me to start using a mouse again and so far I’m ok. In my case it’s the Logitech vertical lift.
“RSI” is not a diagnosis, but rather an umbrella term for “anything repetitive that causes you injury or pain”. The “treatment” for RSI depends on which RSI you have. Even if you Google what all those RSIs are, you probably won’t get a comprehensive list. It’s an underserved area of orthopedic medicine. Anyway, figure out which RSI you have- skin cancer and stomach cancer are treated very differently, and similarly, carpal tunnel syndrome and tendonitis are treated very differently.
Most people with an “RSI” have pain in their hands, but that pain could be caused by an impinged nerve (impingement can occur anywhere between the spine and the carpal tunnel in the wrist), overworked muscles, damaged tendons (very hard to do if you’re under the age of ~50), or arthritis (again, unlikely if you’re under ~50).
Arthritis is very easy to diagnose- you just need to look at an X-Ray of your hand. Conversely, Thoracic Outlet Syndrome is very DIFFICULT to diagnose, partially because many orthopedic surgeons aren’t familiar with it, and partially because nerve impingement is so deep inside you (the shoulder/upper chest area).
My experience with 3 orthopedic surgeons in my city has been consistent- they don’t have the time or attention span to really listen to your symptoms and want to diagnose you ASAP so they can move on to the next patient. Whether this is an issue of our healthcare system or the doctors themselves, I can’t say, but I can say that each one got the diagnosis wrong. They all heard “tingling in the hands” and jumped on carpal tunnel syndrome, even though there was evidence to suggest it wasn’t.
A lot of people swear by the ergonomic/split keyboards, and I’m not sure many realize that those keyboards are mostly adjusting your SHOULDERS- nothing to do with your wrists or hands. They also reduce the pronation your arms are in, which can be beneficial to fatigued muscles, and in rare cases alleviate nerve impingement that occurs around the pronator teres muscle in the arm, but usually impingement there is a result of something like bodybuilding rather than typing on a keyboard for a living. Anyway, if these keyboards do alleviate symptoms, great- but consider that your muscles may be tight in your shoulders, and your posture is probably not what it should be. The keyboard is probably a temporary fix if you don’t stretch, exercise and practice good posture in the “shoulder girdle”.
While society associates CTS with computer use, it’s actually the dentists and dental hygienists who suffer the most from it. Additionally, CTS predominantly affects women. It’s suspected this is due to their having slightly smaller wrists than men, on average, and CTS is simply compression of the median nerve at the carpal tunnel, which has the median nerve, plus many tendons, going through it.
I would be curious to know if any of the provocative tests for CTS increase your symptoms (eg bending your wrist at 90 degrees for 1 minute). It may be that your nerve impingement is occurring further up (like the shoulder area), and holding your mouse hand less interiorly-rotated is relieving the impingement in the shoulder girdle.