On Sat, 2007-10-20 at 09:57 -0700, Les wrote: > I do touch type, but 30 years of coding will have its effects. I, too > have carpel tunnel. I programmed intensively for more than 20 years > in C, two PASCAL like languages and a Fortran like language for > mainframe integrated circuit test systems. It is just the result of > too much wrist and finger action. The muscles and ligaments swell to > deal with the strength and endurance and fill the tunnel, causing the > pain and movement limits. I get the impression that most of these injuries are really to do with doing too much for too long, probably even more so than how we do it. We sit bashing away at the keyboard for far too many hours. Going way off on a tangent, I also play musical instruments with keyboards. I can't play the piano any more, it just hurts too much. I can play organ keyboards, but not for as long as I used to before pain sets in. Many hours continuously when I was younger, nowhere near as many, now. It's a combination of joint pain and some other more general pain that sets in. If I end up in a position where I can't type, I'm going to be really in the pooh. My handwriting is awful, and that causes far more pain than typing does. I just wished I had a personal computer when I was at high school, that would have helped an awful lot back then. > Those wrist pads are supposed to help, but I don't see how, since the > issue is not the wrists, but the structures that drive the fingers, at > least if I understand the physiology. I have used the wristpads, and > they seem to help with the support issue, but I still get the pain > unless I use the braces. And those things are not fun to put on and > take off when you start and stop typing to do other things. They > limit your movement (that is their purpose), and make some things > difficult. >From what I've seen, read, and tried, resting your wrists on the wristpads is one of the worst things you can do - if you're doing it as you type. Stopping typing and resting your wrists on something comfy is another matter. Have you looked at some of the more weird looking ergonomic keybpads? There's ones like the opposite of the curved keyboard (concave separate sections), others with vertical keys that you type like a squeezebox, and various other things. -- [tim@bigblack ~]$ uname -ipr 2.6.22.9-91.fc7 i686 i386 Using FC 4, 5, 6 & 7, plus CentOS 5. Today, it's FC7. Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists.
