Thought Bytes...
August/September 2005

Postural Comfort Survey

Since February 2002, I have been collecting feedback from the public about where they commonly experience discomfort in the workplace. To thank these people for their time, they received a copy of my office stretches sheet, which, I hope, would help them cope with their discomforts.

To date there have been 116 responses. Of these, only 4 people checked off all the boxes, so it is relatively safe to assume that the responses given were representative of the aches and pains that people experienced. Of course, this survey is not representative of the population as a whole - I expect that people would seek information about ergonomics because they were in some level of discomfort. That would skew the sample group, biasing the outcome. I hope those 4 people who were in pain from head to toe got some treatment!

Of the people who responded, I am confident that people who experience discomfort in the workplace have the following overall order of priority of concerns:

• Between the shoulder and neck (trapezius) = 73%
• Between the shoulder blade and the spine = 56%
• Back of the neck (C7 hump) = 47%
• Wrists = 34%
• Lumbar = 33%
• Headaches = 30%
• Lower thoracic = 28%
• Feet = 27%
• Hips = 25%
• Hands = 24%
• Elbow = 21%
• Sacroiliac joints = 19%
• Anterior shoulder = 19%
• Tailbone (coccyx) = 19%
• Buttocks = 16%
• Posterior thighs = 10%

It is not a huge surprise that so many people experience discomfort in the upper back, neck and shoulder areas (the top three concerns). With so much emphasis on keyboarding and mousing activities in the workplace, people end up being in static postures for hours while doing a highly repetitive task with their arms and hands. I would have expected a higher incidence of headaches with this group of muscles, given the number of trigger points in the neck and upper back contributing to referred pain headaches. Maybe that is just my own issue… some people just don’t seem to get headaches.

The high incidence of foot pain is a bit of a surprise. On the survey, the issue is stated as “swollen feet / ankles”, to avoid reference to painful footwear choices (such as pointy toes and high heels). Swollen feet are usually associated with lack of movement and pressure on the return flow blood vessels on the back of the thigh. Yet, posterior thigh pain was ranked the lowest.

Another surprise to me is that wrist and elbow discomfort are not closer together. In my practice, I often find that they are linked. Sacroiliac joint discomfort, tailbone and buttock pain are closely clustered, though this may be associated with lack of knowledge of the terminology. I often find that lumbar discomfort and sacroiliac joint pain are mixed up by the public also.

Over the next few months, “Thought Bytes…” will explore some of the clusters of concerns and how you can improve the workplace to improve your comfort.

(If any of my readers are interested in doing some statistical analysis with my raw data, I would be thrilled. It has been a very long time since I did that stuff!)

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