Home Treatment for Repetitive Stress Injury

The first major storm of the season hit the San Francisco Bay Area today, causing freeway snarls, nearly–drowned cars—and a lot of stiffness in my joints.
Why does rain and weather change affect joint stiffness? I had to do some research to find out.
Arthritis sufferers in particular have been reporting this phenomenon for many years, [...]

This is a post about my struggle and healing from foot pain, which turned out to be a different kind of repetitive stress injury: posterior tibial tenosynovitis. Scroll to the bottom if you’re looking for a list of good brands for arch support and good shoes.
(Or you can read the full version for all the [...]

At its best, massage can do much more than feel good–it can lead to healing, increasing circulation, lifting your energy, breaking up scar tissue, and making you healthier overall.
Before you find a therapist, research the styles they perform and decide which is right for you.  Since everyone has different levels of comfort in relation to [...]

When you work full time, especially if it means chronic pain in your arms and hands, every part of life can start to feel overwhelming — the last thing you want to do is wade through a bunch of old blog entries to find the easy ways to make things better.
So here is a list [...]

Scar tissue forms around a muscle, tendon or ligament after it’s torn, in order to bind it together and prevent future injuries. Scar tissue often criss-crosses across the normal, healthy tissue, so although it helps the healing process, it can also reduce the flexibility of the area. Most people have experienced some kind [...]

Which of these injuries is different? Ankle sprains, broken legs, and carpal tunnel syndrome all cause swelling and pain and need to be immobilized at times.
But the chronic pain syndromes like Carpal Tunnel behave very differently than acute injuries like an ankle sprain or broken bone.
A recent write-up in the Posture Blog describes the [...]

Everytime we read a label or look online, there’s someone threatening us about the next Big Disease — cell phones cause cancer, computers cause carpal tunnel, crossing the street can get you run over by a car, video games can make you psychopathic– or do they?
Of course we can’t live our lives in fear of [...]

Any time I feel tense and sore from typing all day, from now on I’m going to step back and stretch and just be thankful I don’t spend the entire day squatting and assembling cars.
Auto-maker Honda has recently finished a ten-year project developing a robotic, battery-operated machine that will assist its workers in walking, crouching [...]

The old wisdom of stretching says: Hold a stretch 20-30 seconds, to relax your muscles and be able to work out harder afterward. But these static stretches aren’t really effective and may actually weaken muscles, according to a new study from the University of Nevada:
The old presumption that holding a stretch for 20 to [...]

I’ll never forget the day my Workers’ Comp doctor gave me a packet of Vioxx pain killer to try, after the drug had been pulled from the market.
I told him, “I want to heal my arms, not just numb the pain.” Although he admitted that I could hurt myself more by numbing the pain [...]