Locker room talk. A fellow was saying he was in bed for ten days after having his big toe operated on. “Ten days for your big toe?” “Yeah, the doc said my joint was shot and if I didn’t have a pin put in, I couldn’t walk and would be in a wheelchair the rest of my life. Man, I’d wake up in the middle of the night and my toe was killing me.”

In manufacturing and other industries where lifting is part of the job, disorders that affect the muscles and bones are a common problem. In fact, musculoskeletal disorders cause one-third of work-related injuries resulting in missed workdays, costing about $45 to $54 billion annually in lost productivity and treatment, according to estimates from the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine.

On the road every day, transportation workers are responsible for the safe delivery of passengers, materials and goods across the United States. Bus drivers ensure our kids and family members arrive safely.

The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) is taking credit for saving some workers’ backs – and it has the numbers to back up that claim.

The workplace is not immune from the effects of the opioid epidemic that is raising alarm across the U.S. In fact, treatment practices for work-related injuries are likely contributing to the problem, since pain from those injuries is increasingly being managed with powerful prescription opioids.

Certain workers' compensation (WC) policies explain much of the state-level variation in costs and outcomes of claims for low back pain (LBP), reports a study in the December Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, official publication of the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine (ACOEM).

Posture is the way you hold your body while standing, sitting, or performing tasks like lifting, bending, pulling, or reaching. If your posture is good, the bones of the spine — the vertebrae — are correctly aligned.

After the summer months, many of us become less physically active. Cold temperatures tempt us to hunker down and “hibernate.” But that’s not healthy for our bodies. Let’s focus on proper ergonomics to support your back.

Before consumers get to choose products in the supermarket, workers in warehouses nationwide pack bulk quantities of merchandise onto wooden pallets and load them onto delivery trucks. The nature of this work puts the people who do it at risk for serious sprains, strains and other musculoskeletal injuries.