RSI/CANS-symptoms: what to do?
- Make an appointment with your doctor. Your doctor will determine whether a possible relationship exists between your symptoms and your computer work. He can also prescribe what you have to do to in order to cure or alleviate the symptoms.
- Register your RSI/CANS symptoms with the student RSI registration desk.
- Request advice and support from the student advisor, student counsellor or university psychologist.
- As a rule, it is sensible to remain physically active in some way. Naturally, the activities which have caused RSI/CANS must be reduced or stopped, hopefully only temporarily. Consult your doctor and/or physiotherapist about the work you can undertake without aggravating the symptoms, and draw up a plan of action geared towards a complete recovery and which also takes account of the risk factors.
- Check to see if there are activities, for example in the sports building, which will improve your physical condition and, in turn, your muscles ability to carry the strain. The best activities for the prevention of RSI/CANS are sports which require dynamic movement. Examples are swimming, jogging –walking is also good–, skating and cycling.
- If you find it difficult to relax you could do relaxation exercises, for example yoga.
- Check, possibly together with your student advisor, with the student counsellors and the university psychologists if there are workshops, training programmes or courses available that will help you to study differently in order to alleviate RSI/CANS symptoms or prevent them from occurring in the future.
- Try to limit the tasks associated with your RSI/CANS symptoms as much as possible and interchange these tasks with tasks which do not strain your muscles too heavily.
- Based on the above points, examine which factors are important to your situation and which need to be tackled. Draw up a plan of action, possibly together with the student counsellor servicing the student RSI/CANS registration desk.
- If your complaints are causing or threatening to cause delays in your study, you need to at least contact the student counsellor.
- If you have been suffering from RSI/CANS symptoms over a protracted period of time: then stop working behind the computer. A multi-disciplinary recovery treatment is recommended, considering that it is a combination of factors that cause RSI/CANS. If you have been suffering for more than one year with serious RSI/CANS symptoms, it is likely that the condition has become chronic and it will take a long time for you to recover.
