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There is a high prevalence of MSDs amongst dental professionals due to the specific ergonomic risk factors involved. Those factors aren\u2019t going away any time soon and in fact they are worsening as \u201cnew emergent risks\u201d together with psychosocial risks. We should highlight the prolonged forced postures (PFPs) during clinical procedures with patients.<\/strong> The Alexander Technique brings us a new and practical approach to the postural cause of MSDs (and to stress management within the work environment, as there is scientific evidence linking ergonomic and psychosocial risks).<\/p>\n\n Dental professionals need to learn how to achieve and keep up clinical practice in healthy conditions, without affecting either their everyday life or their ability to work, considering clinical procedures as the main activity within this profession.<\/p>\n\n Most of the time one works in static postures that can be very harmful. The usual working postures may cause a sustained muscular contraction, resulting in muscular fatigue and acute pain at the end of the activity. Also, different muscle pains can appear in different parts of the body due to the continuous effort of looking into the oral cavity.<\/p>\n\n Musculoskeletal disorders, including those caused by a great number of injuries in muscles, tendons, nerves, joints, ligaments, etc. are usually localised in the back, neck, shoulders, elbows and wrists. They can be caused by just a single over exertion (accident at work) or by the cumulative effect of repeated effort (professional illness). The predominant symptom is a pain, muscle contraction, inflammation and functional reduction or disability of the affected area.<\/p>\n\n During clinical practice we often face an accumulation of microtrauma related to prolonged forced postures and repetitive movement. Some examples can be the lack of posture support around the shoulders, arms and hands that can cause injuries like tendonitis or the carpal tunnel syndrome, handling vibrating devices that can cause a trapped nerve, premature osteoarthritis and the Raynaud syndrome. Forced cervical static posture due to prolonged cervical torsion and bending whilst seated in the wrong posture or when bending the spine around the lower back area also cause a significant increase in the pressure on the area between discs and a high level of physical overload in general.<\/p>\n\n To sum up, the most common pathologies due to physical overload are:<\/p>\n\n As I already mentioned, there is no doubt when we state that dental professionals are especially prone to suffer MSDs because they spend most of the time in forced and unbalanced postures and they do a lot of repetitive movements. The activities they usually do to compensate (practising some sport for instance) are positive but they do not address the roots of the problem which are the acquired bad posture habits<\/strong>.<\/p><\/p>\n\n Most training in Occupational Health Regulations covers the legal obligations of dental practices but does not offer any effective practical solutions. There is no point in telling workers how they should sit when they don\u2019t have knowledge of the biomechanics of a good posture or how to put that into practice. This is what we offer at OPTIMAL DENTAL POSTURE: practical knowledge, specific and effective to keep an optimal posture easily and confidently.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There is a high prevalence of MSDs amongst dental professionals due to the specific ergonomic risk factors involved. Those factors aren\u2019t going away any time soon and in fact they are worsening as \u201cnew emergent risks\u201d together with psychosocial risks. We should highlight the prolonged forced postures (PFPs) during clinical procedures with patients.There are several […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1134,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"off","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1380","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n\n