You may be physically fit enough to do your job and take on the physical challenges that it entails. Each individual movement is not beyond you, so you’re not at risk of catastrophic injury at any moment.
However, it’s important to remember that doing the same motion repeatedly can cause some serious long-term injuries, even when each individual motion wouldn’t have done so. This is called a repetitive motion injury.
How this can happen
One example of this could be if you work on an assembly line or a product line, and your job is to pick an item up and set it on the floor. Each item only weighs 20 lbs, so you can lift that easily. However, after months or even years of picking up these items and then bending over, you could start to experience serious back pain. You may not be able to point to one specific day where the pain started, but it is clear that that pain is still related to the work that you’re doing.
Another example for office workers is carpal tunnel syndrome. This can sometimes happen to those who type a lot for work. Typing doesn’t seem like a high-risk activity, but carpal tunnel syndrome can cause severe pain in make work impossible.
What should you do?
If you are suffering from this type of injury, you must know about all of your options to seek workers comp. Don’t assume that you need one single catastrophic event that you can point to. You may deserve compensation for lost wages, medical bills, and other things of this nature.
