Yes, "mouse finger" is Real!

by Allen
(Ottawa, ON, Canada)

When most people talk about RSI and computers, it's generally a wrist injury, neck and shoulder pain, or lower back pain. In my case it was my right index finger and that finger alone. It started a couple years ago when I began doing a fair amount of work in Photoshop, the nature of which involved a lot of clicking and click & hold using the mouse buttons to select various things in the photo. At first it was barely noticeable, just a tiny bit of stiffness in the finger that went away as soon as I took my hand off the mouse and flexed my fingers a few times. But over the course of several weeks it steadily grew worse, the finger flex no longer helped and the stiffness became a lot worse.

After a couple months it was a dull ache that only went away after a night of sleep. As a result I had to cut back drastically on my photography hobby since I could no longer spend much time working in Photoshop.