About Occupational Injuries
Early humans survived and thrived as hunter-gatherers. Our ancestors spent their lives running, jumping, crawling, climbing, scrambling and doing whatever else was necessary to eat and avoid being eaten. They moved a lot, and in a number of different ways, and their bodies were very well adapted to do this. The human body is no different today than it was back then, but most of us use our bodies in a very different way. Many jobs are sedentary, and work involves sitting down in a car to commute to a job where they’re sitting all day in a chair, before getting back in the car. One of the strengths of the human body is its adaptability, but if we only give it a chair and a desk to adapt to, that’s all it will be able to deal with.
Many people that have active jobs aren’t necessarily in a much better situation, as the activity they’re performing can often be very repetitive. Again, the body adapts to the thing they’re doing all the time, but then isn’t much good at doing anything else.
Injuries at Work: Causes and Solutions
Almost all the issues we see are occupational after a fashion. We tend to think of an injury as happening in the moment that the pain started, but actually that’s just the movement our bodies experienced the final straw. The last bit of extra strain it couldn’t cope with. The injury happened because of the way the body has been used in the days/weeks/months/years leading up to it. It was an accumulation of strain, and that’s also why some people experience periodic recurrence of the same problems. Even after recovery, they’re still moving their bodies in the same way, putting the same stress on the same areas.
Our aim with treatment is to improve the way the body moves, to integrate the movement so that when you move, the strain doesn’t concentrate in one area. That’s almost always enough to get you out of pain, but that’s only the beginning of recovery. Prevention is always better than cure. We always give people flexibility and strengthening exercises to support recovery, and give advice on workstation set-up and strategies in the workplace, regardless of your occupation, to avoid postural fatigue and repetitive strain.