Need guidance on RSI
 

Hi All,

I am a 23 year old male from India suffering from numbness in my right hand for close to 7 months now. I am a computer professional and have had upper-mid back pain for close to 6 years after I injured myself in the gym.

The past week the numbness in my hand has gotten worse after a night of sleeping with my hand under my head. Ulnar never irritation I presume.
This unexpected numbness precipitated a visit to a physiotherapist and I had 4 days of Trigger Point Therapy for an hour each. He diagnosed me with TOS. Sadly, RSI is not very well understood in India and most doctors are more happy to suggest optimistic thinking and the like :\

I have the book It's Not Carpal Tunnel. I wanted to ask if anyone here had similar problems and had a successful recovery and how long this typically takes.

Thanks
ckvk

It's hard to say that there is a "typical" recovery time. My TOS is derived from a combo of RSI and chronic muscle tension, and I'm still dealing with it, although it has improved and some symptoms like forearm numbness are gone while others are greatly decreased.

You will want to investigate:
-- break intervals
-- posture
-- brugger relief pose
-- chiro
-- massage
-- pt
-- meditation/relaxation
-- caffeine reduction
-- magnesium increase
-- research/reading which you are obviously doing
-- ergonomics
-- armaid product
-- intelliskin product

You may not need all of that. You will have to figure out what you do need.

For me personally, I had to fix more than just my arms or neck. I had to improve my body. Good places to start for that are the books "3 Minutes..." by Weisberg and "Pain Free at the PC" by Egoscue.

I recommend you carve out time in the morning for the stretches. I recommend hydrating first, eg, down a glass of water.

And then some time in the evening for a few more stretches plus research.

As a daily habit.

You might also find this site interesting:
http://www.howibeatrsi.com/

HTH. Good luck.

Thanks a ton chroma!

The exercises have helped reduce some of the numbness. But my bad posture keeps returning as soon as I get better.

Come visit our active TOS forum here-
http://neurotalk.psychcentral.com/forum24.html

A few people in the forum that Jo*mar referenced have had good results with the Intelliskin product for this purpose. I'm going to give it a try myself.