Good morning everyone, Dr. Alex Hernandez here from Life Chiropractic and Acupuncture in North Bergon, NJ. Today we’re here at the office, I’m going to talk about carpal tunnel syndrome, and I’m also going to talk about how you can minimize the symptoms.
What is this famous carpal tunnel? The carpal tunnel, as you can see in this photo, has a lot of stuff that goes through it, you got a bunch of nerves, you got a bunch of tendons, and then you got this fascia running across in here, this is the muscle for your thumb. The carpal tunnel, because there’s so many things that are crossing through here,can easily cause a lot of pain including numbness and tingling, that’s one of the main symptoms of carpal tunnel syndrome. It is caused by repetitive actions such as using the computer, playing the guitar, crocheting, using pressure for cutting.
But the main thing that we see and what I want to talk about is people that are typing a lot. We are going to show you how to avoid these carpal tunnel symptoms. I have Janelle here who’s going to help us out. Janelle’s sitting in her work station, and I want to show you this beautiful mouse pad that we have. This mouse pad has a support right on this area here, and then you have the rest of the area for the mouse to flow through. What you want to do to minimize any carpal tunnel symptoms is to make sure that your hand is pretty much straight. We want it to be nice and flat. What you don’t want--take the mouse pad out, now you get a slight bend here, over a period of time of having a slight bend, this can create carpal tunnel symptoms. By using this simple device, which is pretty inexpensive, you flatten this area out and now the carpal tunnel is free, all the nerves can pass through, there’s no tension, there’s no compression, and you can avoid all that numbness and tingling.
Now I’m going to show you a not so good setup. In this station, we have a keyboard underneath and we also have a mouse. And this is not the most ideal, we don’t use this computer, but you can see my hand here has more of a bend. Now if I do this for 2, 3, 4 hours a day, I’m going to eventually get carpal tunnel symptoms. My wrist is going to get tired, I have to do this a lot, and this is not the most ideal situation. Now, if you have a set up similar to this you may want to change it and purchase one of these mouse pads like Janelle has; this is going to help you avoid all of the symptoms.
Hopefully that’ll help you out. Thank you.
