Home Treatment for Repetitive Stress Injury

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 [...]

Active Release Technique, or A.R.T. as it’s known, is a technique that involves strategic pressure on trigger points combined with guided stretches. Practitioners are highly trained and the techniques are useful for treating repetitive stress injuries, breaking up old scar tissue, and treating sports injuries too.
My experience with A.R.T. started at a climbing gym [...]

Recently we wrote to describe and explain how compression at the thoracic outlet can cause pain, stiffness and problems throughout the arms. The problem remains that many doctors don’t know how to diagnose or remedy the problem.
You can help your doctors by learning more about your own condition, pay careful attention to your symptoms, [...]

The thoracic outlet is the region connecting your chest and neck to your shoulder, where bundles of nerves and arteries pass through to supply sensation or blood to your arms. If they get compressed for a few minutes at a time, it won’t affect the blood flow or nerve sensation significantly–but if you spend too [...]

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 [...]

If you have regular painful flare-ups, or you know someone who does, here’s a new word you’ll want in your RSI vocabulary — tendinosis. It’s an important concept to understand, even if you forget the word itself right away.
It Starts with Tendonitis
You’re probably familiar with tendonitis (or tendinitis), a common term meaning inflammation in [...]

I’ve posted previously about alternate types of treatment for relieving the pain and helping to heal from repetitive stress injuries. One treatment I have not thought much about or explored (but have heard good reviews about) is chiropractic work.
A friend of mine recently threw out his back and visited his local chiropractor, who had [...]

If you have a hand injury and seek treatment, you may end up in a physical or occupational health center being treated by a hand therapist. While you sit there receiving treatments, you might wonder what training they’ve received before working on you.
Hand therapists have to demonstrate the following experience to receive certification:

A demonstrated [...]

Last week, I mentioned a lot of good alternative therapies you can turn to for pain relief.  Of course, you can also perform massage, acupressure and trigger point therapy on yourself.
You can use your own fingers, knuckles, even the palm of your hand or elbow.  However, you might prefer to use some of the tools [...]

In an earlier post, I talked about some of the alternative treatments that Western medicine is starting to recognize.  I also pointed to some of the misunderstandings that doctors still have regarding those treatments.  As a patient, it’s good to research and understand all your options.
Below, I’m providing an overview of some of the most [...]