Can You Sue For Carpal Tunnel Syndrome?
Michael Babboni
Personal Injury
In the 21st century, a large amount of work has shifted over from working in dangerous environments, such as factories, to the relatively safe confines of offices. For people that live in cities, it’s pretty common to have a job in a retail, restaurant or other commercial environment that is more about servicing customers, or handling data-intensive work, rather than the hard manual labor that industries of the 20th century relied on.As result, many people in urban areas don’t usually have to worry about the hazards of going blind from staring unprotected at the light of a welding torch. And while that move to the proliferation of “white collar” jobs has reduced the number of industrial injuries urban residents experience, that doesn’t mean that injuries don’t occur anymore. They do, but now the injuries are smaller, slower and more prevalent in scope. And one of them is known as carpal tunnel syndrome.
The Rise Of The RSI
Carpal tunnel syndrome falls under a class of injuries known as repetitive stress injuries, or RSI. The name itself is pretty descriptive; a RSI is gradually acquired as a worker completes the same action over and over, for many hours at a time during the day. Over the days, weeks, months and years of performing this action, the muscles actually become damaged to due to the focused nature of the action putting pressure/stress on the same muscle groups repeatedly.
In the case of carpal tunnel syndrome, this injury is most often acquired by people who use computers a lot. The act of typing on a keyboard every day makes the carpal tunnel and the median nerve associated with it very active. This means the tendons in the area get a real workout, and they work too much, they get compressed, which causes pain, discomfort and can eventually lead to weakness or numbness in the wrist.
Proof Of Injury
In most cases, if you contract carpal tunnel syndrome, it will be tough to place the blame exclusively on your employer. Most places have protection from a lawsuit for this type of injury, and will redirect an employee to consult workers compensation if any policy exists.
On the other hand, some companies may not have any policy in place for carpal tunnel syndrome or related injuries and they may not need to. Because of just how common computers are for professional and recreational uses, it is up to you to provide the burden of proof that shows it is your company’s policy towards computer—or cash register, or kitchen tool usage—that has created the carpal tunnel syndrome.
If, for example, you are extremely active on social media, and when you go home, you spend hours on instant messaging systems, Twitter, Facebook, online forums, and other means of text-based communication, this really hurts your case. Your company could then easily point to your own recreational hours spent typing as the cause of the injury, not your activities at work.
Of course, depending on your lifestyle and hobby choices, it may be very easy to pinpoint work as the cause of your carpal tunnel syndrome. It’s always best to consult with a personal injury lawyer first to see whether you have a case.