Some of society’s most vexing questions today span the axis between public policy and personal responsibility. Recycling plastic is good for the environment and a civic duty, of course. But, according to past reporting by PBS and NPR, it’s also a status quo that plastics-producing companies have, themselves, quietly promoted since the 1970s to avoid regulations against single-use plastics by foisting the industry’s responsibilities onto consumers.
Could it be possible that bad posture at your desk job or any repetitive stress injuries incurred by sedentary labor might be more of a systemic issue than a question of your personal failings? This thorny, rhetorical, and maybe unanswerable question is at the heart of the issue with ergonomics—but fortunately physiotherapists at Australia’s University of Technology Sydney (UTS) have now taken the most comprehensive look yet at ergonomics’ efficacy for occupational health. Their results, published Wednesday in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, found that “ergonomic interventions” appear to show “no meaningful effects on pain, function, recovery, quality of life or work‐related outcomes (sick leave) compared with no treatment or usual care.”
“When we pooled the best available trials, ergonomic interventions made little to no difference,” the review’s lead author, UTS physiotherapist Poonam Mehta, said in a statement. Mehta and her colleagues scrutinized 20 studies on the issue involving 2,478 participants suffering from work-related complaints of the arm, neck, or shoulder (CANS).
“The certainty of that evidence ranges from low to moderate, so this is a clear signal that the case for these interventions is weaker than many people assume,” Mehta, a senior lecturer at the UTS Graduate School of Health, said.
Simple posturing
Mehta and her team’s review for Cochrane built off 13 studies assembled for a previous 2013 review, updated by seven new studies and two additional new articles related to findings from those prior 13 studies. Most of this research that the team pooled together examined participants dealing with unspecified CANS, but four of these studies focused on specific CANS, like carpal tunnel syndrome.
From this data, the researchers felt they could state with moderate certainty that ergonomic interventions appeared to cause little to no difference in sick leave time when compared to undertaking no treatment. They were similarly confident that such interventions performed no better than simply sitting tight on a waiting list for an alternate form of care.
But the existing body of literature on ergonomics left them even less confident on whether or not these fixes, like a standing desk or a vertical computer mouse, reduce pain or alter the need for healthcare visits.
Part of the problem, according to Mehta’s coauthor Peter Stubbs, who is also a UTS physiotherapist, was simply the room for wishful thinking baked into the design of these past studies. As Stubbs put it in a statement, “methodological flaws and high risk of bias downgrade the confidence in the results.”
Part of the furniture
Rather than simply take for granted that ergonomic furniture and training definitively offer no benefits to people dealing with occupational aches and pains, Mehta hopes her team’s findings will prompt their peers to reinvestigate the issue more rigorously.
“We’d need more evidence to confirm this,” Mehta advised, “as there is not much high-quality research in this area.” No data, for example, is currently available on whether or not ergonomic fixes resolve workplace issues beyond sick leave, like (presumably) a participant’s actual job performance or satisfaction.
Mehta and her coauthors, according to Cochrane’s press release, still hold out the possibility that ergonomic strategies “may still have value in specific subgroups, or as part of a broader workplace or rehabilitation program.” Such future findings would certainly comfort any office managers and executives who have already devoted major company resources to fleets of ergonomic chairs, or split keyboards, or corporate training sessions on good posture.
“Ergonomic interventions can be a big financial burden for organizations,” Mehta noted. “Employers may want to weigh that against the cost.”