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.
I suspect you’re right. I very much enjoyed the Magic Mouse but had similar issues with wrist discomfort. The neutral position of the human wrist is vertical - thumb pointing up as if shaking hands with someone. The Magic Mouse is so low-profile that it forces the wrist into an almost 90deg rotation. Ergonomically, it’s highly problematic.
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.
My 2 cents: I had rsi, then I started bouldering. At first I got more pain. The original rsi, but also the 'forearm pump'. But then after maybe half a year the pain dissappeared. Not just the new pain, but the old pain as well.
A lot of “injuries” we have can be fixed with exercise.
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.
It's like the body reaches a false equilibrium in which the injury doesn't heal completely unless you "knock it out" of the equilibrium again.
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.)
Me too posts are frowned upon on HN, but vote counts are hidden so I'll say for others: me too. I developed RSI as a teen from spending too much time at a desk with bad posture and have dealt with flare-ups into my adulthood. They were miserable and some days I had to take off work. Once I started bouldering, it went away within months. It's probably the forced blood flow in the area, but whatever it was helped tremendously. I can still hurt my wrist if I type in a terrible position, but it only hurts a bit and doesn't turn into the sustained RSI I had.
Building strength seems to help with all sorts of pain issues. I once banged up my arm pretty good in a fall; what helped was going to the gym and doing curls and extensions with whatever the arm could support: five pounds, ten pounds, whatever.
Blood flow is the most likely explanation there. The simple act of activating those muscles forces blood flow, which can often be restricted in a healing area. Same reason we apply warmth to an area and encourage light massage.
I had always a sneaking suspicion that my RSI pain is psychologically triggered, as when I was in a bad mood my fingers didn’t “want to” be worked with. After reading similar comments on HN I grow more skeptical of this over time, which lead me to disbelieving it’s a real pain and not a psychologically caused one.
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.
I developed pretty nasty tenosynovitis in my inner wrist from using a Magic Pad over a year. I even tried switching to using it with my left hand instead of my right, and eventually developed the same problem in the other wrist.
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.
> 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.
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.
I first experienced “RSI” with the 1st Gen Magic Mouse (the one that took AA batteries that needed to be replaced every other month). Terrible, terrible design. And they kept it exactly the same for Magic Mouse 2.
“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”.
Have you tried vertical mice? I hvae one and it helps with my carpal tunnel (which incidentally I'm pretty sure was caused by Mac's butterfly keyboards and their lack of travel distance).
I’m not aware of a scientific study that supports the notion that computer/keyboard use leads to CTS. Conversely, I’m aware of many studies that show CTS being caused by the use of vibrating tools + genetics.
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.
The opposite for me, except that I'm in the 'larger than normal hands' camp. Ergo-optimized devices for the masses don't fit my hands, but they're close enough that I've adapted.
Parametric 3d-printable ergonomic desk stuffs on my to-do list for a few years now.
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.