presents:
New Year’s Resolution: Develop Seven Habits for Health and Fitness by Jin Chang PhD Most of us are very busy and work hard to take care of all
very shallow declination (or look-down) angle and force
the urgent things in our lives. But we often lose sight of
users to excessively tilt their heads, causing surgeons’
a very important thing: our health and fitness. Before we
chronic pain and eventually injury.
address 2014’s seven habits for health and fitness, I would Dr. Wise looked for an alternative and found one
like to share a story.
at a surgeon’s meeting with SurgiTel. He replaced his After SurgiTel was created and ever since, I have heard
traditional loupe with an ergonomic loupe from SurgiTel
the same stories again and again; stories about neck pain
which allowed him to maintain a comfortable, neutral neck
with traditional loupes and relief of neck pain with SurgiTel
posture. With this ergonomic loupe he was finally able to
ergonomic loupes. I would like to tell you these stories, all
work correctly and eliminate his neck stress.
in one. This story is about a doctor I will call Dr. Wise. Dr. Wise joined a practice after finishing his training. One of his senior surgeons who had been practicing there for several years told him “I’ve been having neck pain because of my old, bad pillow. So my wife has bought a new pillow.” Another senior surgeon who had been practicing for many years told him “I’ve developed a major neck injury. I may need surgery.” Dr. Wise heard too many stories like this to relate them to coincidence or to bad pillows. He observed the working postures of other surgeons at the practice.
All the surgeons (including
him) were using traditionally designed TTL (through-thelens) loupes. He saw senior surgeons tilting their heads excessively to see through their loupes (see Figure 1). He noticed these traditionally designed TTL loupes have a
Figure 1: Loupes with very shallow declination (“look-down”) angle promoting an unhealthy posture