Repetition makes perfect and also sometimes injured.
His elbow is in trouble.
Repetitive work injuries can sometimes sneak up on you. Think about a baseball player who tears his UCL (elbow) ligament. It happened because after thousands of throws, repeating the same motion over and over again, his body wore out. There is no single traumatic event. There is just a steady deterioration of the body part until it breaks.
In Workers’ Compensation the most common example of repetitive work injuries might be carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS). A person’s median nerve becomes compressed by the repetitive motion causing numbness, tingling, weakness and/or pain. This particular injury is often associated with those tasked with large amounts of typing or data entry, though by no means is it limited to those types of professions.
Workers’ Compensation cases based on this theory of injury can become tricky to navigate because often the symptoms emerge following a non-work related activity.
This guy probably would have had a repetitive work injury, if he lived long enough.
For example, your job requires you to reach repeatedly overhead. For years you lift boxes ranging from five to twenty pounds as part of monitoring and sorting inventory. You complete your work week and go home to rake leaves. The next morning you wake up with left shoulder pain.
What was the cause of the pain? It is possible that the injury was the result of wearing out the shoulder joint from the repeated lifting, though a medical professional would need to confirm that in writing.
The take away – You need to be aware that work-related injuries are not always so cut and dry like when a coworker drops a pallet of bricks on your foot. This is important because the 30C demands that you describe how the injury occurred. If you indicate that a repetitive work injury is the result of a single traumatic event, you may be out of luck.
