Biokinetic Blueprint: Preventing Injuries One Move at a Time: Remote work crisis

One of my standard questions during my initial assessments with patients is, "What do you do for a living?" The answers vary drastically, which means I get to interact with many interesting people. My mind immediately shifts to what the job entails physically, and inevitably my next question is, "How many hours a day do you spend sitting behind a desk?" The stigma has been set in motion, and the saying adopted is that "sitting is the new smoking." It was an interesting case study during the COVID shutdown and the "new normal" of working from home. I had an influx of patients reporting lower back issues, shoulder, and neck issues. These were sudden onset with no attributable reason other than starting to work from home.

Common threads appeared and were interesting to note as a result of working from home. I'll break them down a little bit; people were even less active than being at work, desk setups were makeshift, no ergonomics were considered, and even more time was spent sitting behind the desk.

We were forced to work from home for reasons out of our control, where it is supposed to be our place of comfort and refuge. This seems all good and well until we get down to the nitty-gritty and realize it's not all that it turns out to be. My synopsis of the uptrend of certain issues during this period was that people were restricted even more than they realized while being at work. The conclusion was that at work, people were used to getting up to go to a restroom, which may not even be on the same floor. Meetings were done in person, which meant going to another room or going to clients. Lunches, smoke breaks (even though I don't agree with them), and talking to colleagues meant that we weren't in stagnant positions behind desks for as long a time as we were exposed to once set up at home.

Therefore, it has become a constant recommendation for the majority of patients still working from home, who have neck, shoulder, and lumbar issues to either:

• Invest in an ergonomic setup for home with the proper equipment and regular breaks.

• Invest in a standing desk incorporating bouts of standing and sitting throughout the day.

The general consensus with standing desks has recommended a 2:1 ratio of sitting to standing. This means that if you are sitting for an hour, stand for half an hour. This allows for a change in position, and standing is actually considered a workout. The amount of musculature it takes to stay standing and upright is quite taxing.

My greatest takeaway from the COVID pandemic related to the above topic is that we are all creatures of habit and movement. Thus, when these are disrupted, unintentional circumstances may occur. On this basis, movement is our friend, and as the saying goes, "motion is lotion" for our bodies.