Headaches can occur at work for a wide variety of reasons, and for our purposes it’s simpler to classify headaches by what triggers them off. In all cases of work-related headaches, treatment follows the same principles – identify the trigger factor, and then deal with it. This sounds simple, but isn’t always easy in practice.
Work-related headaches fall into four main categories, according to the type of trigger causing them. These are:
Musculo-skeletal and ergonomic problems (the relationship between the worker and his or her environment)
Light, noise and vibration
Chemicals, including allergies
If you’re getting a lot of headaches at work then it’s worth thinking carefully about whether any or all of these items apply to you. Sometimes the answer is easy: a headache coming on whenever you go into the factory’s paint shop, or one that always occurs when you’ve been using the computer, is easy to sort out.
However, there are traps. Obviously, a headache which seems to come on at work is likely to be directly related to work conditions. But headaches may occur when stress is removed, so a headache which occurs at the weekend can be due to relaxation from tension from work. Don’t forget, too, that in allergies the body can be supremely sensitive, and traces of work chemicals that are taken home on clothing or overalls may continue to cause symptoms at times away from work.
Allergies can create diagnostic traps, too; for a start, in allergies the cause-and-effect relationship can be altered by constant low doses of exposure to the offending substance. You might imagine that if you’re very allergic to a substance then your reaction is likely to be brisk, and directly related to your exposure to it. This is absolutely correct, but only if you have been away from the substance for some lime. In this case, exposure to the substance you’re allergic to will produce a sudden and often intense reaction. However, if you are constantly exposed to a substance to which you are allergic there is a more random pattern of reaction, combined with a general malaise. Therefore, if you’re allergic to the chemicals exuding from the new carpet in the office, you may feel generally under the weather while at work, with headaches coming on more or less at random, unrelated to the time of day, or the day of the week. Often it’s only when you go on holiday, away from the offending chemicals, that your headaches and other symptoms go away, returning when you go back to work. But isn’t it easy to blame the headaches on going back to the stress of the office? This is where physical and psychological causes for headaches overlap.
Discovering the root cause of headaches at work can sometimes be easy; on other occasions you may need a great deal of patience. You need to change things one by one: for example, altering only the position of your computer, or making a point of not going near the chemical, store, or avoiding the new reception area.
Altering a lot of things at once may get rid of your headaches, but finding out which of the ten items you’ve altered is the culprit may be difficult. If you’ve altered the position of your computer at the same time as staying away from the reception and avoiding the paint shop – and your headaches clear as a result -then which of them is the actual cause?
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