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Those of us who have our health, take it for granted. We pay homage to it through doctors visits and medicine cabinets full of patent medicines, but in the end we try to ignore our bodies as much as possible. People who have suffered an injury or are otherwise incapacitated in some way try to forgive us the luxury of our disregard.
The old adage goes that you don't really miss something until you lose it. For nothing is that more true than your health. Those of us who are blessed with the benefits of good health and good physical condition spend very little time thinking about our bodies. We take what might be called the minimum necessary precautions -- not just because taking care of your health is expensive (it is) but also because it is not in the bounds of our normal self-discipline to take on any more chores until we have to. Most people are really sloppy about taking care of their bodies and will live quite a few years less as a result. It is debatable whether it's better to live 10 years as you please or 20 years as you ought to.
But there is also a great deal of unnecessary pain and suffering going on in this big bad world, most of which can be blamed on a variety of workplace mishaps and conditions that are preventable or correctable. These causes can be divided into three areas: accidents, incidents, and ergonomics. An accident is, strictly speaking, something that happens by coincidence of circumstance which could not be foreseen. If you step down a step and the heel comes off your appropriate footwear, causing you to trip and injure yourself, you have had an accident. If you are walking somewhere and a big piece of steel comes down and removes your arm, you have had an incident. Since it should have been foreseeable that your arm would lose any contest with the moving steel, the circumstance of your arm meeting the steel should have been prevented -- hence it is an incident, not an accident. In the same way, if when your heel came off while you were descending a staircase which was poorly lit and lacked safety handrails and you were injured much more severely because of those circumstances, those injuries are the result of an incident, not an accident, even if the precipitating factor was accidental.
Ergonomic causes of injury usually involve people working harder, faster, or for a longer period of time than the body's natural recuperative abilities can sustain. For example, just about any adult can knock in 10-15 nails with a hammer. If you give a fairly strong person a hammer that's quite a bit heavier, they will be able to pound more nails per minute, once they get a little practice. However, over the course of 15-20 years of use, that heavier hammer may cause gradual injuries that mount up. After the owner of the heavy hammer goes into physical therapy because they can no longer button up their own shirts, it becomes clear that it would have been better for them to have gone slower with a lighter hammer.
Everyone knows that if you spend your whole day standing up, your feet and legs will hurt. It is just as true in Chicago, Illinois as in Manchester, England. But in Manchester England, the Safeway grocery clerk who is running your food over the optical scanner to total your grocery bill is sitting on a stool, whereas her Chicago counterpart is forced to stand her entire shift. That used to puzzle me until I learned that the European Union has implemented a comprehensive series of ergonomic safety regulations that apply to practically anyone who is gainfully employed. These standards are fairly rigidly enforced throughout Europe, with the end result that the number of people they annually invalid out of the employment rolls is far smaller than in the US.
And this is not just a few invalids we're talking about here. In some areas of the country, particularly more rural areas where there are typically only 1-2 big employers, who run their businesses pretty much the way they want to, as many as 1:3 adults is on some kind of public assistance owing to a physical disability, most of which are the result of workplace injuries, repetitive stress, or both. Where I live, it's taken for granted that 1/3 of the people are on disability, 1/3 work for the city/county/state, and the remainder used to work for Boeing.
What is needed here is an awareness of a problem that we don't want to pay attention to. Until we're hurt, we don't want to think of the suffering of other people. It bothers us and makes our lives uncomfortable. We need to be less comfortable, that others might see their suffering lessen. As long as anyone's child is born with crippling disability as the result of their job, your own children and grand-children are at risk. There are certain things that are manifestly self evident. Among these is the right of a working person to a life worth living after work.
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