Proposed OHS laws are based
on junk science which would not pass a Daubert Hearing.
Language can deceive. If your
father dies, his death causes your sadness. You are not sad if you don’t know
he died and you are sad if you are told that he is dead, when he is not. You
might not be so sad if you inherit. So, it is not the death of your father
but the belief that he has died and its meaning that causes sadness. Only
beliefs and their meanings impact the mind and cause feelings.
So it is with disease. If you
don’t know you have one, you might go about your business till you die. If
you are told you have a disease and injury is traumatic disease, you will
do what your doctor orders, even if he is mistaken. Not even another doctor
is immune from medical authority.
RSI was mass psychogenic illness,
and painful illness at that. Motor and sensory arm symptoms, weakness clumsiness,
cramps spasms, burning, coldness, tingling and pain occurred in series and
in combination and attracted five to fifteen ‘diagnoses’ in each case and
five to fifteen clinical interventions to match: panaceas, tablets, splints,
plasters and operations, gimmicks and gadgets, electrical, electronic and
laser stimulation, heating and chilling. The condition was well known as
a functional somatic syndrome and classified by the World Health Organisation’s
International Classification of Diseases as writers’ cramp and occupational
neurosis, in the section on mental and behavioural disorders.
RSI, cause and acronym, was the
brainchild of John Mathews, the non-medical editor of the Occupational Health
and Safety Bulletin produced by the Victorian Trades Hall/Australian Council
of Trade Unions, in early 1981. Mathews attributed RSI to all the aspects
of the workplace that unions wanted to improve. Similar content, acronym and
caveats soon appeared in a document typed in lower case, called repetition
strain injuries: approved guide to occupational health, which the National
Health and Medical Research Council ‘adopted’ at its meeting in June, 1982.
Extensively cited as the NHMRC guide, it described conditions said
to be caused or aggravated by manual work, called them all RSI and deemed
them all to be preventable by making changes to occupational tasks..
This authoritative caution was
circulated in workplaces in the form of guides to early identification
and prevention together with lists of approved doctors who would know
how to prevent RSI before it became irreversible: by putting you on worker’s
compensation. Epidemics followed prevention campaigns. Clinicians became involved
on behalf of symptoms and invented remedies and created a literature some
two years later by the circular citing of each others’ commentaries, the NHMRC’s
authority and press reports of the epidemic. On a literal reading of these
papers, there was no condition in an arm that was not RSI and there was no
symptom that did not have a work-related, culpable precursor activity.
The prestige of the doctors who
comprised the NHMRC legitimated a furphy and unleashed an uncontrolled human
experiment. Healthy workers were told that they risked contracting a preventable
injury. Pain developed in the collective arms of a previously healthy workforce.
Evaluation of this experiment would have predicted that some people might
never be able to give up the idea that they had been injured. Had consideration
been given to the consequences of such an experiment, its research protocols
could not have passed the NHMRC’s own ethics committees.
RSI was not caused by occupational
tasks. Affected workers included an air traffic controller, some computing
staff, some librarians, a physiotherapist, a couple of reporters, a carpenter,
a painter, some linesmen, laundry assistants, cleaners, gardeners, labourers,
technical officers, graphic designers, draftsmen, meat inspectors, a parking
inspector, some motor mechanics, school assistants, dietitians, cooks, nurses,
kitchenmen, orderlies, tradesmen and one professor. Keyboard telephonists
who did 400 key strokes an hour were affected at ten times the rate of speed
typists who did 17,000 keystrokes an hour. Part-time workers were more likely
to be affected than full-time. RSI was caused by the adoption of the belief
that occupational tasks are in themselves harmful. That these tasks do not
harm in proportion to quantum done, did not harm before and do not harm now
should be obvious.
Thoughtful RSI sufferers become
irritably defensive when asked why they had it and not their co-workers who
had done the same thing.
Locked in by their doctors’ rationalisations
and ad hoc attribution theories, they struggled to find a logical cause for
their continuing pain and weakness. One woman returned from abroad to an epidemic
in Canberra and she became affected. Recognising the sheer absurdity of the
suggested causes and seeing no difference between her work conditions overseas
and at home, she wondered if RSI might be the effect of Black Mountain Tower,
a local microwave facility. Her doctor wrote that she suffered from delusions
while he persisted with his various keyboard theories.
The affected ‘claimant’ population
laboured under a great deal more stress than the ‘person’ population as reported
by the Australian Census. They were ten to twenty times more likely to be
getting married, bearing children, coping with death and illness in parents,
partners and children, getting divorced, and suffering from unrelated ill
health. Moreover, they were coping with two or three of these problems at
once. While some of these events are not problems of themselves, they can
be hard to manage at the same time as one is fulfilling work obligations.
Who knows how common it is to
lose one’s best friend, one’s baby sitter, one’s faith or hope, have a child
sick, to be unhappy at home or at work, to hate one’s job, to be renovating
or building a house, or be setting up a farm or managing a family business?
Competing obligations put heavy demands on women who work.
Constructing RSI
will tell you who got sick and why and what should or should not have been
done about it. Tell your doctor.
Constructing RSI: Belief and Desire. Yolande Lucire. UNSW Press.
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