What Kinds of Overuse Injuries Happen in the Workplace?

Repetitive stress injuries often come on gradually, as soft tissues lose their strength and flexibility. If you leave them untreated or try to work through them, they’re likely to get worse over time, leading to pain and impairing your ability to perform many tasks.

Symptoms may include swelling, pain, numbness, weakness, and decreased mobility.

These injuries can come in many forms, such as:

• Carpal tunnel syndrome
• Tendinitis
• Bursitis
• Sprains
• Impingement syndrome
• Rotator cuff injury
• Tennis elbow
• Knee injuries
• Dystonia (writer’s cramp)

How to Protect Your Body from Overuse Damage at Work

Making changes in your workspace and lifestyle will reduce wear and tear on your muscles, joints and tendons. Here are a few suggestions for people who work in an office:

Use lumbar support at your desk chair to protect your lower back.

Set your chair height so your forearms are parallel to the floor, with feet resting flat on the floor.

Keep supplies within easy reach so you don’t strain muscles by overreaching for items.

Take quick breaks from your work whenever possible to walk around and give your muscles a chance to recover.

Bend at your knees, not your back, if you have to lift something.

Alternate tasks frequently so you’re not doing the same movements for too long.

Try activities that relax muscles, such as massage, stretching and yoga.

Cut back on processed foods that promote inflammation and inhibit healing.

Follow suggestions from OSHA for setting up a health workspace to help you avoid overuse injuries.

Don’t delay in getting treatment when symptoms begin.

Healing Repetitive Stress Injuries with Chiropractic Care

Muscle weakness and pain from repetitive stress injuries will restrict mobility, leading to stiffness in your soft tissues and joints. This can worsen your symptoms.

Chiropractors use their expertise in the musculoskeletal system to diagnose and treat the sources of overuse injuries. Spinal adjustments and other treatments help the healing process for your injuries by:

• Improving flexibility, strength and range of motion
• Reducing inflammation and swelling
• Relieving pain
• Freeing up restricted joints
• Optimizing the function of your nerves and nervous system

Specialized treatments such as Active Release Technique (ART) help to break up scar tissue that builds up from overuse injuries, relieving pain and stiffness.

Your chiropractor can advise you about home exercises and good nutrition to keep the healing process moving along. Best of all, your care is safe and natural, entirely free of drugs or invasive procedures.

Being proactive with prevention and early treatment will help you stay productive and pain-free at work.

Contact Eastern Oklahoma Chiropractic to Book Your Free Consultation

We’ll work with you to start feeling great again! Call our Broken Arrow office today at 918-940-4630.

The post Overuse Injuries at the Office: Natural Treatments and Prevention first appeared on Chiropractor Broken Arrow.

The first question is always, how did you injure yourself? If your injury was traumatic like a car accident, fall or sudden impact, there is always a chance something is broken. At that point, we recommend examination and X-rays before beginning treatment. Most patients who come into my Broken Arrow chiropractic office for treatment for injuries aren’t in this situation. A lot of time it is something that built slowly over time or “just happened”. In these cases, we still undergo the examination and X-rays in order to properly diagnose the problem and the diagnostic tests allow us to rule out more serious pathophysiology in most cases.

In the case of your back, we need to do a thorough exam to see how your posture is influencing your problem. In today’s world where people can’t pull their eyes away from a screen, it’s important to evaluate if a forward head posture is putting pressure on your skeleton in ways that it shouldn’t. Your head weighs between 12-15 lbs so if it is sitting forward on your skeleton an inch or four inches in some circumstances, it won’t just cause neck pain. It often causes problems all the way up and down your skeleton.

When you seek treatment for injuries in our chiropractic office, we also evaluate how your lifestyle is contributing to your back problem. Are you a mostly sedentary person? Do you sit for work, commute an hour each way and then come home and sit more? Regular exercise and movement throughout the day are critical to feeling good and maintaining health.

As far as an actual treatment for injuries, I typically set people up on a regular adjustment program until we can make changes in how the spine moves and change how the bones articulate with each other. Once we see what changes from that, I can make better recommendations involving stretches and exercises. In the beginning phase of a back injury, I typically recommend a lot of ice/heat contrast therapy along with walking to remain active.  Oftentimes, it’s appropriate to take a break and/or modify the excessive activity you are doing in order to allow the injury to health completely and rapidly although I am not a proponent of eliminating activity totally in most cases.

The good news, if my patients adhere to the treatment plan we set up, especially the first month of it, we see great results.  We say “we’ll have you doing cartwheels in no time.”  Unless of course, you were never able to do a cartwheel in which case, I wouldn’t advise attempting them :-).  If you have questions on whether or not, chiropractic can help your injuries, call our office and set up your first visit.  We are easily reached at 918-940-4630 or you can find us online at www.easternoklahomachiropractic.com.  Thank you for allowing us to be your chiropractor.

The post Injury Recovery in Broken Arrow – Eastern Oklahoma Chiropractic first appeared on Chiropractor Broken Arrow.