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I think he touches on a lot of good points, but has his priorities a bit wrong.

In my opinion, the most important factors to consider are actually your diet and your lifestyle. RSI and similar types of issues can usually be traced to high levels of general inflammation in the body. It's not the usage you're putting on your body that's the culprit - it's how your body is reacting to that usage with an inflammatory response.

Programmers are very high risk group for factors which cause inflammation:

1) Toxic diets. E.g. high sugar, high processed carbs, high industrial seed oils, high intake of meat from unhealthy animals. Low intake of high quality fats and omega 3s. Poor gut health.

2) Lack of sleep / poor sleep quality.

3) Lack of movement.

4) Chronic stress.



Re: "General inflammation in the body" -- genuinely curious, do you have a source available for this? Not implying this is wrong, merely this seems rather strange to me and out of the mainstream (similar to the claim that autism is caused by inflammation).

Again, I am not claiming this wrong -- merely I've yet to hear any actual RSI suffers, MDs, or ergo specialists bring up this theory.

I can see some indirect link, e.g., high calorie diet and great deal of processed carbs leading to type diabetes-II which leads to general aches and pains, however.


Sure, here are some references for you to dig through.

First, by definition RSI is an inflammatory response. So, here's a good overview of what is meant by "inflammation" in the body:

http://www.marksdailyapple.com/inflammation/

And here are studies related to the causes of inflammation I mentioned:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17402291?dopt=Abstract

http://jn.nutrition.org/content/135/3/562.full

http://www.nature.com/ajg/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/ajg20104...

http://scienceblog.com/40178/poor-sleep-quality-increases-in...

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20036931


It is not by definition inflammatory. It is a pain syndrome that MAY have an inflammatory component.

You have a point, but this is the kind of single-cause, worked for me attitude the article warns about it and does people a disservice.


Thanks, this is useful.




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