Name: Fact or Fiction: Does typing on a computer cause carpal tunnel syndrome?
Uploaded: 2022-11-01
Duration: 4 min 18 s
Description: You have pain in your wrists, tingling in your fingers, soreness in your arms — is this carpal tunnel? Orthopedic surgeon Dr. S. Steven Yang breaks down how time at the computer keyboard impacts your body, and offers advice for computer users in pain.

You have pain in your wrists, tingling in your fingers, soreness in your arms ⁠— is this carpal tunnel? Orthopedic surgeon Dr. S. Steven Yang breaks down how time at the computer keyboard impacts your body, and offers advice for computer users in pain.

Fact or Fiction: Does typing on a computer cause carpal tunnel syndrome?

Health

Orthopedic surgeon Dr. S. Steven Yang breaks down how time at the computer keyboard impacts your body, and offers advice for computer users in pain.

Does typing on a computer cause carpal tunnel syndrome?

Orthopedic surgeon Dr. S. Steven Yang of NYU Langone Health explains.

So you've probably heard that using the computer keyboard will lead to carpal tunnel syndrome is that fact or fiction? Well, it's fiction. Carpal tunnel syndrome is probably one of the most misunderstood conditions that I come across. Patients often come to me with pain in their arms soreness in their wrists and they oftentimes are suspicious that they might be suffering from carpal tunnel syndrome. But carpal tunnel syndrome is a very specific problem. It's actually a compressive neuropathy, which means that a nerve is being pinched and it's being pinched at the wrist level. In fact, in our wrist we have a tunnel, the carpal tunnel, which is actually the space through which the tendons that bend our fingers travel, but also the median nerve, which gives us feeling in our fingers and also gives us electricity to the small muscles at the base of our thumbs. And what happens in carpal tunnel syndrome is that space becomes too crowded too tight and the nerve, which is the softest structure in that tunnel becomes compressed and that leads to symptoms of numbness, tingling sensations, pins and needles, sensations, and then late in the disease, the muscles that the nerve innovates will start to atrophy and become weaker except in very rare circumstances. Computer use and keyboard use are not likely to cause carpal tunnel syndrome. In fact, we don't really know why people get carpal tunnel syndrome, but we do know that there are certain predisposing factors that make you more susceptible. For instance, diabetes, obesity, just being a woman as opposed to a man makes you more likely thyroid diseases. And also pregnancy. The third trimester of pregnancy is a time when many women develop symptoms of carpal tunnel syndrome. The vast majority of patients who come to see me with pain in their hands, their wrists or their forearms more often than not, what they're experiencing our overuse symptoms. And those can be things like tendinitis is, or chronic sprains over using any part of the body will lead to pain as opposed to carpal tunnel syndrome, repetitive strain injury can manifest themselves in a number of different ways. It's a condition that's very non specific. There's nothing torn, there's nothing ruptured, there's nothing fractured. But what's happening is there's a mechanical overload of the structures of the hand and arm and that results in pain. It's like any kind of machine part that has a certain tolerance. And if it exceeds that tolerance, the parts start to malfunction and our bodies do the same thing, which is that the pain receptors start to become stimulated and we start experiencing the kind of discomforts that we're talking about taking soreness, stiffness, cramping. So some people who have carpal tunnel syndrome, their symptoms will abate if they use a wrist splint. Sometimes we give cortisone injections into the carpal canal. We put people on nonsteroidal anti inflammatory medication and in many cases their symptoms will abate. Unfortunately, in some circumstances, the condition does not resolve and we worry about nerve damage because of the pressure on the nerve. So what we do is carpal tunnel release surgery and what we're doing at the time of the surgery is we're actually cutting the transverse carpal ligament and thereby opening the carpal canal and decompressing the median nerve. One thing that's been found to be really helpful for those people who work on a computer keyboard for protracted periods of time is actually take frequent breaks. I usually tell patients to take a break at least every 20 minutes, also trying to reduce any unnecessary work that they're doing with their hands. So, for instance, if you're accustomed to going home and playing video games or if you're doing a lot of social texting and emailing for the time being, you want to reduce that as much as possible. We also try to increase their for doing those tasks and a great way to do that is through physical therapy or occupational therapy. A therapist working with a patient who is suffering from hand, wrist or arm pain due to repetitive strain injury. What the therapist will likely do is what's called work hardening. It's trying to train patients to be more tolerant to the kind of work that they're doing and essentially toughening up their hands to be able to put up with those tasks