Expert says RSI no reason for taking weeks off work

A visiting Australian psychiatric expert does not believe repetitive strain injury is a legitimate disease.

"RSI was an uncontrolled experiment on the community," Dr Yolande Lucire, forensic psychiatrist and senior lecturer in rural health at the University of New South Wales, told the Skeptics Conference in Christchurch.

She said over-reaction and publicity about RSI were caused by a misinformed health profession frightening the public.

"A healthy workforce was told that it was at risk of contracting a preventable disease that could disable them, when there was no such disease."

RSI was due to muscle fatigue or postural problems, and was not a condition people should be able to take weeks off work for, she said.

RSI was often due to problems outside work and a product of "somatisation", where patients described physical pain to reflect their mental problems.

Dr Lucire's research had shown claimants were 10 to 20 times more likely to be getting married, bearing children, coping with death or illness in relatives or loved ones, getting divorced and suffering from unrelated ill health. Often they were coping with up to five of these problems at once.

She said those who did more work were less likely to suffer from RSI, with keyboard telephonists, who did 400 keystrokes an hour, affected at 10 times the rate of speed typists, who did 17,000 keystrokes an hour.

Dr Lucire's claims have annoyed occupational safety and health medical practitioner Dr Chris Walls, who said the New Zealand experience was very different from that in Australia, where generous compensation laws encouraged claimants.

Chronic pain from work-related tasks was a physical condition, he said, and sensible employers structured workers' tasks to avoid it happening.

An Accident Compensation Corporation spokesman said that specific claims of RSI or occupational overuse syndrome were not accepted.

Injuries caused by gradual processes, whether work-related or otherwise, had to be attributed to a condition, such as tendinitis.

- NZPA