What helped me completely cure my wrist pain was reading "The Mindbody Prescription" by Dr John E Sarno. I was in a similar position and was considering a career change. I took over a year off of work to try and recover (eventually coming back to work part time). Once I read this book and applied it, I was able to immediately recover. It's been about 7 years now since.

The ideas it presents are definitely not mainstream. But it is fairly logical and scientific. There are plenty of other sources that talk about the connection between the mind and the body, but I've never seen anything present it in such a way that makes sense to me and gives ideas of how to directly apply it.

I'm not that great at explaining it in a nutshell. The wikipedia page seems to have some decent info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tension_myositis_syndrome

But the best summary I've read is this word doc: http://www.rsi.deas.harvard.edu/handout.doc (hit the Google cache for HTML version)

I have RSI and I have found swimming to be helpful. Zero-impact and it really relaxes muscles after a bout of coding.

Check out Terry Laughlin's http://totalimmersion.net program for how you can learn to swim freestyle without struggle.