Gel wrist rests and 'ergonomic' mouse pads — do they help, or just move where it hurts? Pain & Posture

You're using it wrong, and so is nearly everybody. A wrist rest is meant to support the heel of the hand between movements — it is a place to rest, not a pivot to press into while you move. If you're planting on it and rotating the hand around that contact point, you have built a smaller, softer version of your sharp desk edge. Float the hand, move from the elbow, let the rest catch you when you stop.

The finding I keep coming back to: ergonomic pads and vertical mice measurably change wrist position, but in people who already had carpal tunnel syndrome they did not reduce carpal tunnel pressure. Position and pressure are not the same variable. That doesn't make the accessories useless — it means don't expect a foam pad to treat something.

Tingling in the ring and little finger runs a different nerve path from the classic thumb-side symptoms, and a sharp desk edge pressing into the forearm is a very ordinary cause of it. I'd get it looked at rather than go shopping — mine turned out to originate at the shoulder and no pad on earth was ever going to touch it.

Cheapest experiment in this entire room: a length of pipe insulation or a folded towel taped along the desk edge. Costs nothing, and within three days you'll know whether the edge was the problem.

The pad that helped me wasn't marketed as ergonomic, it was just enormous — about 90 x 40 cm, so keyboard and mouse both sit on cloth and my forearm never crosses a hard lip anywhere on the desk.