INFLICTING A GENERATION WITH RSI

Karl Barksdale © 2002

What do keyboarding, the mouse, video games, musicianship, and the Internet have in common? More than we might want to admit, these activities are inflicting a generation of our young people with unnecessary repetitive stress injuries.

Take Mariette, for example. By eighth grade she typed 44 wpm at 98 percent accuracy. She began typing early in elementary school. At night, she practices the piano and chats with her friends online. The overuse has taken its toll...

…Lately, for hours after her keyboarding class, her lower arms are in pain. She has the warning signs of severe RSI. Her situation so concerned her mom that she requested a moratorium on her typing practice. Her piano teacher is also introducing remedies.

But the prognosis isn't good. Carpal Tunnel Syndrome (CTS) and other repetitive stress injuries are progressive, chronic disorders with long latency periods. This means that the root of Mariette's problem started years earlier. If overuse behaviors continue, she will be battling chronic pain for the rest of her life and will be forced to give up some of life's most precious pursuits. Perhaps she has to make a choice between typing and the piano.

Sadly, Mariette is not alone. She joins at least five other students in her eighth grade class with similar ailments and complaints. For instance, Sally has a difficult time twisting a doorknob in the morning. Rodigio is experiencing numbness and tingling sensations in his hands and arms. For April there is a definite loss of strength between her right and left hands.

A year earlier, at the same school, we reported the following problems:

For Jenny, Miguel, and Mandy the pains of carpal tunnel syndrome came early. (Their names have been changed to protect their privacy.) For this trio, RSI symptoms began in their elementary typing classes. By the time they reached a required seventh grade keyboarding class their pains were getting worse. For Jenny, ten minutes of warm-up practice on the keyboard would cause pain for up to three hours afterwards. One worried mother refused to sign the course disclosure agreement for keyboarding writing the following comment on the back of the form:

"The reason this is late is because I have refused to sign it. It is no fault of Miguel. I am not signing away my right to hold the school responsible if he gets carpal tunnel."

Other afflicted parents have approached this Utah middle school's computer teacher pleading, "Please don't let my child go through the pains I've suffered."

And Utah isn't alone in this problem. Lini S. Kadaba of Knight Ridder News Service on February 11, 2001 reported:

"In a 1999 survey, 170 sixth-graders at an Andover, Mass., middle school complained of neck pain (35 percent), lower backaches (20 percent), sore wrists (17 percent), sore shoulders (17 percent) and sore elbows (10 percent)."

"A survey published last fall of Harvard University undergraduates showed that 40 percent reported symptoms of RSI."

(To read this entire article, visit www.SpeakingSolutions.com/injury/ middleschoolrsi.html)

AT LEAST, DON'T ADD TO THE PROBLEM

We all suspect that overuse injuries among the young are not caused strictly by the keyboard or even the mouse. There are usually other factors. In most of the cases we have seen, the afflicted students also play the violin, the cello, or the piano. Also, in most cases, there is a family history of RSI. And, nearly all of the students with problems use the Internet for e-mail, chat, or play video games on the computer. Add it all up and overuse among the young people, whose hands are still growing, is out of control.

Schools have an obligation to curtail keyboarding. Not that keyboarding necessarily causes the problem all by itself, but it definitely contributes its share of rapid repetitive motions, movements that the hand was not built for.

In an interesting, but largely debunked study at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Arizona, 29.6 percent of hospital respondents reported hand paresthesia - a fancy word meaning numbness, prickly sensations or abnormal hypersensitivities. Of the 257 respondents, 70 employees reported RSI related symptoms. Of those, 27 or 10.5 percent were classified with CTS, which is similar to that found in the general population in past studies. (Cornell University Ergonomics Web, Downloaded: April 20, 2002, http://ergo.human.cornell.edu/MayoCTS.html)

There is something important to think about in regards to the Mayo study. It may suggest that as many as 1 out of every 10 of our students should not be typing at all! But which students are predisposed to injury? Which students carry the risk factors? Given the long latency of these injuries, we have no way of knowing or guessing which students can type safely and which students should refrain from repetitive motion activities. Additionally, it could also be that between 25 and 30 percent of the students we're teaching today, if they continue typing, will develop some form of RSI.

The problem is, in our national frenzy to make our children computer literate, we never stopped to think about the impact overuse would have on growing hands. (visit The 10 Things Wrong with Elementary Keyboarding at www.SpeakingSolutions.com/injuries/elemkey.html).

The irony is, many of our most computer literate programmers are two finger typists. Typing never was computer literacy -- it only addressed input literacy -- and is now being replaced by speech and other input technologies. Memorizing ASDF JKL: is not a higher level thinking skill and adds nothing to the cognitive abilities needed to manage today's technologies.

Many experts suggest that students cut way back on their keyboarding and mouse clicking. Noted author Deborah Quilter tells parents to, "Reduce overall exposure to computers." She adds, "While the minimum threshold of time spent at the computer before injury occurs is not known, severe injury has occurred with as little as two hours of computer use a day. It would therefore seem prudent to limit your child to 20 minutes or so a few times a week. If your child uses the computer longer than that, insist that he or she take a 5-to-10 minute break every 20 minutes or less." Links to this and other important sites on this issue can be found at www.SpeakingSolutions.com/injury. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and visit all of the new links.

At the very least, our elementary and middle school keyboarding programs, -- which require growing hands and fingers to type at proficiencies reserved for adults in the past -- are contributing to a wider problem that has become a major concern of our information age.

We can blame the Internet, video games, the violin, or any number of repetitive motion activities, but it doesn't change the inextricable dilemma that a significant percentage of our students should not be typing or mouse clicking at the level many schools currently require.

If you wish to talk more about this issue, I would be happy to discuss this perplexing issue in more detail at karlb@speakingsolutions.com.

Sincerely,
Karl Barksdale
Teacher/Author
Springville, Utah